A Dead Man in Deptford Read Online Free Page A

us
to a back or private room. Jack Alleyn, as to make up for his
brother, was of a face not easy to forget, with a black jutty beard,
jutty eyebrows that were fierce, a fierce eye, one only, the other
walled and sightless, and the flame cheeks of one that knew his
own potions. He himself brought in my small beer, beer not so
small for the others, save for Watson who had a pewter mug of
sherris. Henslowe laid money on the humped and scarred table,
saying:
    - Earned on the flat of their backs.
    He was a coarse man, and he alluded to one of his brothels.
He had other interests and of one he now spoke, saying:
    - The situation is known well enough. James Burbage is
spent out. Said ruination, did he, well, no wonder. Too much
of Jack Brayne’s money in it. His groceries do well but his
soap-works in Whitechapel dissolves into suds, it will soon be
no more. You know the strength of his investment. He says
the playhouse is rightfully his. Now, as you know, Brayne is Burbage’s wife’s brother, so we shall see what we may call a
family feud. There is no future there. I see you pull your beard
in some dismay, Mr Watson. A matter of the lawyer who acts
for Burbage, am I not right, Hugh Swift, and you to marry his
sister, have I got it? You will be forced into the taking of sides,
which you will not like, for the salt and sauce of your paid quips
are spread over the whole players’ commonalty and you would
be neuter.

    - Neutral, Watson said. You know too much, Henslowe.
    - That is my trade. I have a new one, and that is to
build a theatre. Give me three months and it will fly its flag
ready for autumn and the opening of parliament. The Burbage
houses are wrongly placed. Bare fields like open country though
full of dogmerds and dead cats. It will not do. The future of
the business lies on the Bankside, among the other bringers of
joy and diversion. The bullring and the bearpit and you know
what.
    - So, Alleyn said, we play against roars and screams and
the rapture of dying. He meant, as I knew, the spending of
Henslowe’s brothel clients.
    - Well, it is life, it is joy. I have bought a share in the
bearpit and, a hundred yards off, a very pretty rose garden. In
that garden I am ready to build what I shall call the Rose, which
is an apt name. And you, Ned, shall help with the planning and
the design of it.
    - So we are to leave poor Burbage and set up over the
river. What will become of poor Burbage?
    - To each man his own misery. Drain those and we will
refill. We shall need plays, Mr Kyd. Who is this one here
(beetling at Kit), in the fine velvet cap with a pheasant feather?
It was true that Kit was dressed not like a poor scholar but like
a London gentleman, and I guessed that he was wearing some
of Watson’s discardments. Kit said:
    - How much is there in the writing of a play? Henslowe
said:
    - Work you mean, or money? Kyd said:
    Too much work and too little money. What have you done then? He spoke jealously. Alleyn took sheets much blotted from
his bosom and said:

    - Listen.

    He then went hm hm and spoke of a grammatic fault: one
Greekish lad with all these poleaxes?
    - Licence, Kit said. Kyd said, more jealously:
    - Fantastical. Infants swimming, who taught them to swim,
they are not fishes. And what is all this wantonness of cruelty?
I would never go so far.
    - The Trojan war, Kit said. It is a play of Dido and
Aeneas. Aeneas speaks.
    - Not the whole of the Trojan wars would have spilt enough
blood for a fishpond.
    - You think in terms too literal. What you cannot show
you will not have.
    - But that is how I have improved on Seneca. Seneca
but reports, and that is bad playmaking. Our groundlings
have read no Seneca, they come to see as well as hear.
    - So you would have Oedipus tear out his eyes in full view?
    - So I would. They pay to see horrors not hear of them. I
see you go shudder shudder. The fine Cambridge man pedantical
about his classical authors.
    - We will save