Embrace Me, Gaveston

by Christopher Marlowe, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

Matthew Sherrat came down the length of the room with his arms out, stopped a yard short of the boy he was to embrace, and looked over his shoulder at the hired men sitting along the wall.

"What, Gaveston! welcome!" he said, and then, in his own voice, out of the side of his mouth, "Kiss not my hand, sirrah, I have been at the onions."

They laughed. It was a good laugh, warm and quick, the laugh of men who had been standing about since eight in a cold room over a stable waiting to be wanted. Sherrat heard it and was pleased by it, as a dog is pleased by a door opening, and he put his arms about Nick Pyle and clapped him twice on the back, hard, the way you would greet a cousin at a burial, and stood off again.

"Embrace me, Gaveston, as I do thee," he said, and winked at the wall.

I had been sitting on a barrel by the window with the book on my knee. It was the only whole copy in the house. The players had their parts, each man his own roll, pasted end to end in strips and wound on a stick, with his lines and the last three words of the speech before each one, and nothing else. A hired man in a company can play a lord for three years and never once learn how the lord's story ends. That is not carelessness. Paper is dear, and a whole play in the wrong hands is a thing another company can buy.

I closed the book on my finger.

"Again," I said. "Without the onions."

Sherrat turned round. He was a sharer, and had been a sharer when I was still construing Ovid under a master at Canterbury, and he played kings because he had the belly and the voice for them, and the beard, which was his own and which he oiled. "Master Marlowe," he said, "it is a jest the yard will thank us for."

"It is. That is why I want it out."

"They will laugh at it whether I give them leave or no."

"Then let them do it without your leave," I said, "and we shall see which of them does."

That was the reason I gave. It was a true reason. A stage is a room in which a man may see two other men do in the open what he has only heard of in corners, and his face, in the moment of seeing it, will say what he has decided about it before his mouth is asked. If the king winks, the yard laughs because the king has told them to, and every face in the house is the same face. I had no use for a house with one face. Nor had certain other people, who paid me less than the players did and asked for more.

It was not the whole of the account. It seldom is, with me. But it was the part that could be said in a cold room before eleven hired men and a boy with a rag in his mouth to keep his voice warm for the Queen.

Sherrat looked at me a while. Then he shrugged, because a sharer does not quarrel with the poet over a jest when he can quarrel with him over the money at the end of the week, and went back to the far end of the room, and came down it again.

He came down it slower. He stopped where he had stopped before, a yard short. He held his arms out and said the line as it is written, without a wink, and for a moment, in that grey stable light, with the hay smell coming up through the boards, he was a king who had been alone a long time and was now not. Then he put his arms round Pyle the way you would carry a sack of meal you had been told was glass.

Nobody laughed. One of the hired men coughed.

"Better," I said, which was a lie, and opened the book again.

✾

Nick Pyle came to my lodging that evening with his part in his hand. I had not asked him to. He stood in the door with the roll held against his chest like a man carrying a hen to market, and said that he had a difficulty with the cues.

"Which?"

"All of them, Master Marlowe." He held the roll out. "I have the ends of his speeches. 'Another Gaveston.' 'Since thy exile.' I have the ends of everybody's, and I come in on them very well, but I do not know what they are the ends of. When he says 'another Gaveston', I do not know if he is angry or merry or what he is. Master Sherrat says it differently every time and I do not think he knows either."

He was about twenty. He was a glover's son out of Norwich, and he had come to the players by way of the waits there, the town's musicians, so that he could play the cittern and sing a little and stand still on a stage without looking as though he were waiting to be paid for it, which is rarer than it ought to be. He had dark brows that met, and he had been given Gaveston because the man who should have had it had broken his leg in March falling down the stair of a house in Shoreditch where he had no business to be. Pyle had not asked for the part. He had simply been the one standing nearest when it was handed out.

"Come in," I said. "Shut that. The woman of the house thinks every draught a sin against her coals."

I lodged that spring in two rooms over a cutler's near Norton Folgate, with a fire, a table, a bed, a press for my books and a window that looked across the gardens to the backs of other people's windows, which is the only view a man in my position ought to want. Pyle sat on the stool. I gave him beer. I took the book and turned to the first scene and read him the old king dead, and the letter, and Gaveston coming in with it in his hand, which was his own speech and which he knew, and then I gave him the cue and he said it to me, sitting on the stool with the beer in his other hand:

"Sweet prince, I come; these, these thy amorous lines
Might have enforced me to have swum from France,
And, like Leander, gasped upon the sand,
So thou wouldst smile, and take me in thy arms."

He said it well. He said it to the fire, as he had been told to say it, out to the yard, an address; and that is how such a speech is generally said, and it is not wrong. But I had written it in this room, at this table, and I knew who it had been said to when it was first said, and it had not been to a fire.

"Stand up," I said.

He stood up. I put the book on the table, open, and went over to the window, and turned round, and was a king.

I will not pretend that I was a good one. I am not a player. I am a man who has watched players for five years and knows exactly how a thing should be done and cannot do it, which is the condition of most poets and all critics. I said, "What, Gaveston! welcome! Kiss not my hand," and I crossed the room in four steps, and I did not stop a yard short of him.

"Embrace me, Gaveston, as I do thee."

I did. I want to set it down plainly, because a great many things have been said of me in company and will be said again, and they are mostly said by men who were not in the room. I put my arms round him and I held him, as a man holds what he did not think to hold again. He was taller than I by an inch and smelled of the stable and the beer and, under that, of the alum and oil they dress the gloves with in his father's shop, which I think gets into a child's hands and does not come out. For a moment he stood quite still. Then his own arms came up, slowly, the way a man reaches for a thing on a high shelf in the dark, not certain it is there.

"Thy friend, thyself," I said, into his shoulder, "another Gaveston."

And he heard the cue. I felt him hear it. I felt him understand, all at once, what it was the end of.

I let him go and stood off. The fire made its small noises. Somewhere in the cutler's shop below, a wheel that had been turning stopped turning.

"So," I said. "That is what he means by it."

Pyle looked at me. He did not look away, which I had thought he would; most men do, after such a thing, and look at their hands or the floor, and say something about the weather. He looked at me with his dark brows down as if I were a speech he had been given in a hand he did not know, and he was making out the letters.

"Is that how you would have it played, Master Marlowe?"

"It is how Edward would have it played."

"And you?"

It is a question you are asked sooner or later, in rooms of that kind, by somebody who has earned the right to ask it. I have answered it many times. I have answered it to men who were writing the answer down. I said:

"I am the poet. I have it on paper."

He considered that. Then he took up his roll from the table and began, carefully, to wind it on its stick.

"I should like," he said, without looking up from it, "to hear the rest. Not my part. The rest. How it goes with him." He meant Edward. I think he meant Edward.

"It goes badly."

"I had thought it would. I have no lines at all after the middle of it."

So I read him the rest. I read him the barons and the Queen and young Spencer and the Bishop. I read him the abbey at Neath, and the King taken in his monk's habit, and Kenilworth, and the crown that will not come off his head. I read him Berkeley and the dungeon where the sewers of the castle run, and Lightborn, who is the cleanest man in the play and the worst, asking the keepers for a table and a featherbed. The fire went down and I did not mend it. When I had done the candle had burnt to the iron and Pyle was sitting on the floor with his back against the bed and his knees drawn up, and his face, in the last of the light, was a face I would not have shown to anybody.

"They will laugh," he said. "When the king and I. In the first act. Master Sherrat is right, they will laugh at it."

"Some of them."

"And then this." He nodded at the book. "And then they will not."

"No."

"That is why you let him do it. The table. That is why they will let you have the first act. Because of the end."

I had not thought a glover's son from Norwich would get there in an evening. It had taken the Master of the Revels, who is paid to get there, a week, and he had not entirely arrived.

"You should go," I said. "The watch will be out."

He went. On the stair he turned, and I thought he was going to say something, and he did not; he only lifted the roll on its stick a little, as a man lifts his hat to a lady across a street when he does not know her well enough to cross it.

✾

We played it on a Thursday in May, in the afternoon, to a house as full as a house can be in a spring when every man in it has heard the talk of the sickness in Southwark and come anyway. I watched it from the gallery. I generally do. A poet in the tiring-house is under everybody's feet, and a poet in the yard is in danger of being thanked.

I had been in my place a quarter of an hour before I saw Hugh Selby in the gallery opposite.

He was a clerk. He had been a clerk in Mr Secretary's house in Seething Lane when I was first sent places, and he had made out more than one of the warrants for money that came to me there, in a small hand that leaned backwards as though it did not like what it was carrying. Mr Secretary had been two years in St Paul's. Selby had not gone into the ground with him. A clerk who knows the hands of a great many men, and the sums against their names, does not lack for masters after the funeral, and I had heard that he was now in the service of somebody whose name I had also heard, at a supper, from a man who stopped speaking when he saw I was listening.

He was not looking at the stage. Men in my line of work seldom do, in a playhouse. He was looking at the yard, as I was, and every so often, in the way of a man who has been told the price of a thing and is checking the goods against it, he looked at me.

I looked at the stage.

Gaveston came on with his letter. Pyle said his speech to the yard, as the speech is meant to be said, and when he came to Leander he lowered the paper and looked at it, not at them, a moment longer than anybody had told him to, and the yard grew quiet in the way a yard grows quiet when it has not been asked to. Then the three poor men came on, and he dealt with them, and then the King came, and the barons, and the quarrel, and they cleared the stage, and Gaveston stepped forward out of the place where he had been hiding, and the King saw him.

I did not watch them. I had watched them for three weeks. I watched the yard.

Sherrat came down the stage. He did not wink. He did not stop short. He put his arms round Pyle the way I had shown neither of them, and Pyle put his arms round Sherrat the way I had shown one of them, and held on, and they said the lines over each other's shoulders with their faces hidden.

And the house laughed.

Not all of it. Perhaps a third. There was a gang of prentices by the stage-rail, in the blue coats, who roared, because prentices roar at a dog crossing the yard; and a knot of gentlemen of the Inns in the twopenny rooms who laughed the high, short, careful laugh of men who wish it known that they have seen through something; and here and there, all over the yard, single men who laughed a moment after everybody else, having looked first to see if it was allowed. Those I noted. Those are always worth noting.

Then there were the others. A tall man by the left-hand post, in a russet coat, a waterman by his hands, who did not laugh and did not look away, and whose mouth was working at nothing. Two young men at the back near the gate, who had been standing shoulder to shoulder since the beginning and who now, very slightly, were not. A woman in a good hood who put her hand flat on her breastbone and kept it there. A grey-haired gentleman on the bench below me who said, quite clearly, to nobody, "Well," and nothing after it, and who was still saying nothing after it when the barons came on again.

I looked across the gallery. Selby was not looking at the yard now. He was looking at me, to see what I was looking at. And I understood, in the way one does, all at once and with no surprise at all, that I was not the only man in the house who had come to the play to watch the faces of men who were watching two men embrace; and that the face he had come for was mine.

So I gave him one. I gave him a poet's face at his own first act: anxious, a little vexed with the King for taking the line too slow, glancing at the tiring-house door to see that the next entrance was ready. It is not a hard face to make. I have been making it for seven years and it is mostly true.

He watched it a while. Then he looked down at his knees and I saw his shoulders move, and I knew that he had a table-book there, and a pencil of lead, and that he was writing something, and that I should never know what.

✾

Gaveston is taken before the play is half done. Warwick's men have him off by the arms, and he goes off saying something brave and not quite finished, because they do not let him finish, and after that he is a name in other men's mouths and nothing more. He has no more lines.

He came up into the gallery soon after, in his own doublet, with a smear of red still on his lip where he had not got the paint all off. There is no rule against it. Players who have died early often come and watch the rest; there is nothing to do in a tiring-house except fold things. He came along the bench, stepping over feet, and the grey-haired gentleman looked at him and did not know him, which pleased him, I could see, more than any line in the play. He sat down beside me. Our shoulders were as close as two men's shoulders are on a full bench, which is very close, and nobody in London would think anything of it.

Across the gallery Selby looked up from his knees, and looked at us, and looked down again.

We watched the King lose his kingdom. We watched him in his monk's hood at Neath, and we watched him give up the crown and take it back and give it up again, and Sherrat, who had a voice that could fill a church, made it small in that scene, so small that the prentices at the rail stopped shoving one another to hear it. And then it was Berkeley, and the dungeon, and the King in the mire, and Lightborn coming in with his lamp.

Pyle had heard it all read once, by a guttering candle, from a man who is no player. He had not seen it. I felt him go still beside me when the keepers brought the table on.

There is a moment, in that scene, when a playhouse holds its breath; I had written it to be held. Lightborn bids the King lie down and rest. The King tries. The keepers come in quietly and do what they have been told, and the table goes down over the King in the bed, and Lightborn says to them, as a careful man says it to men he does not trust to be careful, So, lay the table down, and stamp on it, but not too hard, lest that you bruise his body.

Nobody laughed. Not a single man in that house. Not the prentices, not the Inns, not the late laughers in the yard who had looked about them first in the first act to see if it was allowed. I looked for them, one by one, as I had come there to do, and every one of them had his face turned up to the stage with his mouth a little open, and not one of them was thinking of anything at all except a king under a table.

The keepers stamped. You can hear it from the gallery: two men's heels on a board over a third man, slow, together. And under the noise of it, on the bench, where the edge of my cloak and the edge of his lay over one another in the press of the house, I felt Pyle's hand find mine, and close on it, hard, as you would close on a rail on a ship.

I looked across the gallery.

Selby was not writing. He was not looking at the stage, either. He was looking at the two of us, at our faces, which were turned up like everybody's, and at the place on the bench between us, which he could not see because the bench in front was in the way and the cloaks were over it. He looked at it for a long moment, the way a man looks at a wall he has been told has a door in it.

On the stage the keepers stamped again. I did not take my hand away.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Christophorō Marlōvō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Christopher Marlowe, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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