The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber

mourning at the death
of dear Kit Marlowe.’ He gives me the look
that tells me he knows everything. ‘He laid
some juicy insults on our much-loved town
and all who dwell in her. So he was gaoled.
It isn’t safe to write so openly.
As he should know, having had such a friend.’
     
    I see the puckish one light up a pipe
only a year ago, when we were free.
     
    ‘Poor Nashe.’
                         ‘Indeed, poor Nashe.’ The silence falls
    over our conversation like a hood
to protect the guilty. I have run away,
though all my friends might go to Hell for me.
‘How is he?’
                       ‘I hear he’s railing even now
    that the city’s corrupt.’
     
                                                 The news was heartening.
    We all might come through this. ‘And how is Ned?’
     
    Thorpe’s wall goes up. ‘I’m sorry. It seems we’ve drunk
a little too much. I blame the Christmas cheer.
It isn’t good to name a person’s friends.’
He fakes a yawn. ‘I’m done. We’ll meet again.
More soberly the next time.’
                                                       And he’s gone.

NECESSITY
    Necessity, the mother of all art
and half the population, brought me square
to a shared room on the knee of Bedlam gate.
My rent was gladly absent, but my sleep
was patterned by the cries of the insane.
If madness sucks in madness, then perhaps
that room made sense.
                                         I shared with Thomas Kyd,
    the both of us employed to furnish plays
for the good Lord Strange’s Men. A bed thrown in
and a desk at either corner. Thomas Kyd
was a white-skinned creature who avoided sun
and drooled in his sleep. He had a lodger’s cough,
winced when I cursed; he’d beg me to be quiet
lest I bring the Devil on us. So I teased.
He was a toy, an instrument for me,
a winter amusement, and I played his tremor
as perfect as a lutist plucks a string;
it fed my humour through those long dark months
without Tom Watson’s wit.
                                                 We wrote in stints.
    He had the daylight, squinting at his scenes;
I chose the dark, the quietude, the sense
of the world asleep wrapped round like a cocoon
where I plotted to shake them rudely, candlelight
making a pool so all I could see was play.
     
    We sat there under blankets. Kyd was blocked.
He ground out word by word, a line an hour,
stumped by The Spanish Tragedy ’s success,
his sighs enough to cure meat, but his words
uncooked or overdone.
     
                                         ‘Hamlet, revenge?
    What kind of cry is that? A fishwife’s cry.’
Kyd draws in his neck and covers up the script
I’m reading over his shoulder. ‘It’s a draft.’
‘Should the man broadcast his plots for all to hear?
He’s mad indeed.’
                                 ‘It is a draft, I said.’
     
    ‘Apologies.’ I sit down on the bed
and tug my boots off. ‘Surely what we need
when we’ve put good plays behind us, is hard truths.
Better you hear it now than when it dies
and they laugh the tragedian off the stage.
Can you feel how he might feel?’
     
                                                               ‘The tragedian?’
     
    ‘Your Prince of Denmark. He that needs revenge.’
Kyd screws his forehead up, as if he’d strain
to wring the feeling out.
                                                 ‘Not in your head,’
    I say, ‘but in your heart. You feel it here ?’
Thumping my chest. But Thomas Kyd looks blank,
and then, as if he’s stumbled on a road
that shaves his knees of skin, his eyes grow dark
and wary. ‘It’s not yours. It’s my