Voices from the Past Part 119

Globe Theatre is on fire...bucket brigades,

smoke around men with pails,

smoke around boys with pails,

smoke in trees, smoke in the rain:

Jonson talking and gesturing to Shakespeare:

Burbage screaming orders...

A wall topples...

Inside the conflagration

books and ma.n.u.scripts burning.

J

onson and I watched the Globe burn-the afternoon cold, with rain falling. People crowded around; there was mud and water underfoot.

"Someone must have set our theatre on fire, Will!

Jesus, how it burns!" Jonson cried.

"No. I was inside. I saw the thatch start burning."

"Wasn't there anything you could do to stop the blaze?"

"We tried! We got ladders and buckets!"

"Lord, look, now! A wall's toppling. The hut's gone.

Why it has fallen off. Will, our props are afire. Our scripts! The flames are roaring..."

"Stand back!"

"Stand back or get burned!"

"How long has it been burning?"

"Maybe an hour..."

The flames seemed to meet in a giant peak, a peak that had at the top a great tree of smoke. It was raining harder now; the crowd had moved back.

G.o.d, wasn't it enough to have to fight the plague? One month our doors were closed, next month we were open, next month we were shut again. That was bad enough, but no theatre meant no chance.

"Kemp is sick...the Globe is gone," I said.

"Let's go and get drunk!" Jonson said.

Later, Burbage told me it was a cannon, fired during my own play, that set fire to the Globe. We met in the street. Yanking his beard, swearing, he spat on the cobbles, and turned away.

Henley Street

1615 All Souls' Day

Pain is gross companion, inducing lecherous thoughts, destroying temperance, stability, mercy, courage, fort.i.tude. Craving release, I fought all day to remember better times. At night, with candles lit, blankets around me, I find ease... I remember...

I am in a lemon grove, naked stone pillars stabbing out of the tops of the trees, Greek pilasters by the sea. We are eating on a terrace overlooking the water, a lazy meal, with old wine. The moon rises, drunkenly, fat, water-distorted, closing in on us, in rhythm to the waves below. We hold hands. The moon spells urgency, urging us to the grove, where we lie side by side.

"Ellen...Ellen..."

The lemons are yellowish in the moonlight: there is something stage-like about their motionlessness: it is rather as though we were in a velvet box, facing the sea.

Stars have something to do with the fragrance drifting about us, the only movement apart from the waves and rising moon. I suggest we go down to the beach, so inviting. Ellen says no and I forget everything but her fragrance and the fragrance of the lemons, her whispers, her kisses.

That Scot profile, so chiseled, that bluecap voice, so warm, that hair of hers, softer than Juliet's... A great rock, a sea boulder, surrounded by waves, glows in the moonlight...her skin is whitened: a ringlet glows on her neck.

Marlowe, Jonson, Raleigh, Spenser have had their days in jail; I have had mine-those county sties where pigs and dust ate my ma.n.u.scripts and foetid odors ate my skull, jailed by the local thief who deemed each man a thief who thought:

If all the world and love were young...

But Raleigh it never was except in fancy and during the dead reckoning on paper: that is why the five of us stumbled backward in time, learning and escaping simultaneously.

We used to play chess, many of us, p.a.w.ns, varlets, kings, knights, evenings, one play bastinadoed on another, Caesar against t.i.tus, Hamlet against Lear, Portia against Cleopatra-always a gamble, along the stinking alleys, along the nocturnal slugtide Thames, along the turtle sea: stonehenge of concupiscence, murder vs. philandering, octogenarian vs. boy, s.e.x vs. cuira.s.s, check vs. cul-de-sac.