'I married Isis on the fifth day of May' - Dylan
Of wed-bound husband's barren ridden hue,
Of mine, indeed, treat I. Thus fell it out:
As Greekish fables hail Pomona's pace,
Or Phoebus gentle season rolling forth,
In MAYUS tide - conjoined in such hour,
Whenasmuch Cynthia's cart had so careered
That of her bearings o'er breeze's swathe,
And royall Sojourns in marinick churnes,
Had tantafugued her radiant Master's tread
His tenfold Raye to swirle in fivefold full,
Grew I to Memphian maid, or Orphicke queene,
To Osiris and Horus demurest...
Tuesday 23 March 2010
Wednesday 17 March 2010
From 'Finalist Madrigals'
You walked into the library
Like you were walking into a cell
Laptop strategically dipped below a tome
Manufactured I think by Dell
You put your phone on silent
As you heard yourself breath hoarse
And all the boys dreamed that you’d be on facebook
You’d be on facebook (chat)
You're so lame
You probably haven’t noticed this song is a ripoff
You're so lame
I bet you’ve got JSTOR crisply bookmarked
Don't you? Don't you?
etc
Like you were walking into a cell
Laptop strategically dipped below a tome
Manufactured I think by Dell
You put your phone on silent
As you heard yourself breath hoarse
And all the boys dreamed that you’d be on facebook
You’d be on facebook (chat)
You're so lame
You probably haven’t noticed this song is a ripoff
You're so lame
I bet you’ve got JSTOR crisply bookmarked
Don't you? Don't you?
etc
Saturday 13 March 2010
Paene insularum
I suppose there was a marsh once,
There, where I heard of Sirmio –
But winter asked for warmer work,
So I might have skipped on, to the Lesbia pages.
Do you remember the island of Ely,
The sort of place where they always make stands?
If our island was ever an island, like that one,
It’s gone underground.
Did you even go down to the river much, back then?
I think that you know about sensitive skin,
And that midges breath differently when in soft water,
Still bite as we blush, though.
I feel strongest in places I’ve almost forgotten,
You like sediment.
There, where I heard of Sirmio –
But winter asked for warmer work,
So I might have skipped on, to the Lesbia pages.
Do you remember the island of Ely,
The sort of place where they always make stands?
If our island was ever an island, like that one,
It’s gone underground.
Did you even go down to the river much, back then?
I think that you know about sensitive skin,
And that midges breath differently when in soft water,
Still bite as we blush, though.
I feel strongest in places I’ve almost forgotten,
You like sediment.
Friday 12 March 2010
Mad Tract
Mammon, Saviour of Athens
“It’s something like the priesthood now,” my then tutor said a while ago, adjusting her cassock. She had heard rumours that I wanted to become an academic, and consequently wanted to enact a chat, and, I assume, a sanity check. For myself, I’ve always heard rumours that I wanted to become an academic, and rarely paid them overmuch attention.
“I mean,” she continued, “do you know what you want to do, what it is? It requires a sort of cold, full-on dedication now, of course. The gentleman-scholar doesn’t exist anymore.”
The chick had, naturally, got to the node of the matter. I’m aware that the gentleman-scholar doesn’t exist, that we’ve gone from Sliggers (see prior article) to sloggers, but I am young and foolish and, in my moments of reconciling myself to the Worship of Athena, I do like to think I could help to reverse that process.
In this article I will try and articulate how, by musing on what the academy was, what it is, and what it might become, in two more or less frightening versions of the future: in one of which I am a distinguished professor and probably the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, while in the other I have settled for becoming a strolling player, or something, and have not implemented my Plan to Save the Eggheads.
So we begin with what Athens was: et in Arcadia Minoo: the past world my tutor, correctly, intuited I am liable to sentimentalise. William Empson is lounging in bed with a couple of lady-boys and a Sheffield lecturer. CS Lewis is recovering from a hard evensong with the help of hot toddy. It is a golden morning, and a few golden minds are writing about the Golden Age of English Literature: “an age synonymous with the glory of two words, Aristocracy, and England” (thanks, CS). What distinguishes such a milieu? There are very few people there; some are extremely clever, and some are just the Earl of Colfax’s favourite nephew (see Trinity, ITV, out now on DVD). Very few of them are girls, partly because debutantes still exist (so that’s my ex-tutor catered for, I suppose). What is going for this age, other than the dress sense? It is this: the operation of a very powerful internal shame ethic. When one writes, one must write well what can be read well. Criticism is a kind of literature, not a sort of riot police force maintained by the taxpayer to curb literature’s excesses.
Only by our own era, of course, criticism – like every other arena of academic study – has become exactly that – a poor creature, bloated then straitjacketed by taxes, funded, and restricted, at every level. It is a historical period that is about to suffer, with the desolation of the higher education budget, intense withdrawal systems, but it has already done its damage. Scholars, no less than their gaily debt-gathering pupils, float about on mysterious money about which they know little and care nothing – on the academic level, unlike the undergraduate one, this ethereal benevolence does not come back to claim them in the form of debt. The fact is that very generous cumulative public funding makes the question of demand irrelevant to the publication of academic works. When academics could be trusted to enforce the laws of taste instead, the gap in necessary discriminatory control was filled.
When literary merit – which I would define, in the sphere of criticism, as a style obedient to the diktats of beauty and of clarity – became unfashionable, a curious situation was produced. The taxpayer was now supporting at the country’s universities a class of teachers to produce and publish work which could not conceivably interest him or her; jargonical, marginal, aggressively priced and pompously expressed.
It will be objected perhaps that I speak of the “literary” and the “critical” and yet apply my apparent disillusionment to all disciplines, including the sciences. I believe that the point self-evidently stands; it’s just that the cancer of elitist inexplicability, only in progress in the arts, subsumed the sciences rather longer ago. Science is fascinating and powerful, but there is a reason it is not the queen of dinner party discourse – the scientific community, well within recorded memory, decided, patchily then eventually conventionally, that an attractive writing style was, in their portfolio, a dispensable skill; so, to give energy to higher priorities, they dispensed with it. Rebels exist – Richard Dawkins’s maddest diatribes should and will still be read by a general public, because he is an excellent writer – but theirs is not the usual way.
In the context of the sciences this development is regrettable, as their skills become underappreciated and ever less competently taught at school level, laymen becoming, and staying, repelled by science very early on. But in the context of the arts, the abandonment of communication and elegance is more than this, it is – in a variety of thought where utilitarian value should not be of paramount importance – completely debilitating. Arts academics in the absence of taste become distinguished on the grounds of industry and originality. Industry means they put a lot of stuff on paper or maybe the internet, originality means they invert fashions and privilege the obscure over the good. A computer programme could fulfil all these functions; at times the last Vice-Chancellor of Oxford was, I recall, on the point of suggesting that it should do.
Here is my planned healing process; it comes in a simple step and later a more drastic one. First, it is not very hard to write interestingly and clearly, although when one is angry one tends to get a bit more interesting and a lot less clear; I apologise for the operation of that process within this article. Anyway, the scientists jettisoned, the humanities are jettisoning, the belles lettres because they developed a perception that style distracted energy from more important things. It doesn’t. Lucidity actually makes work easier to write as well as to read. Freud, Jung, Einstein and Rutherford were lucid. In the quasi-artistic worlds of political science and philosophy, Macchiavelli or Bertrand Russell have many lessons to teach to the aesthete. The tribe of academics at work on non-books for non-audiences, or as they would put it “monographs for supervisors”, are thereby leading harder and unhappier lives as a result of their doctrinaire idleness about style.
However, the regrafting of taste on a voluntary basis is unfortunately likely to be quite a slow process. I suggest that we, as a nation, encourage its secure advancement by, in the meantime, privatising all universities presses, thereby requiring every academic to seek some sort of commercial publisher. The internet would still exist as an output for the most doggedly vital, and yet commercially unattractive, research; the most recalcitrant biologists could cure malaria quietly on a nice blog somewhere; but they could abusing bookshelves while they were about it: unless of course they felt like expressing themselves in a way that would truly edify the public, incidentally repaying the debt they owed that public for their own education and careers.
The effects of this course of action would be alarming, especially in such an unruffled milieu as our beloved Oxford, but I believe ultimately beneficial. Supervisors and senior tutors would have to recommence rating and promoting their colleagues on quality in a general rather than a specialised sense. The university and the strange lands outwith it would begin to reflect each other a little more.
For the strange thing is that the legendary breed of jovial ivory tower dwellers, Lewises, Empsons, Trevor-Ropers, Bayleys, were actually more realistic, fleshly beings than the anaemic spectres who occupy their posts today. In the names of modernity, contemporaneity, originality and research rigour, academics today have firmly turned the ivory key; and if they do not have recourse to the Dinshaw Doctrine (they won’t, by the way), they may be turning it for the last time. In the post-Credit Crunch Crumpet landscape, the pillowing public money proved evanescent, the student debt powerfully unattractive to the young, and the intellectually enthusiastic sane enough to go anywhere but academia, I don’t see how the academy can retain any kind of primacy in education and interpretation. I don’t know whether the new priesthood will be teachers or TV personalities, but they won’t be hons, dons and smoking MA Oxons.
At a recent meeting of the Stubbs Society Sir Keith Thomas recently lamented the likely future downfall of academic history before popular biography. Well, Keithy, I say they get as they deserves.
“It’s something like the priesthood now,” my then tutor said a while ago, adjusting her cassock. She had heard rumours that I wanted to become an academic, and consequently wanted to enact a chat, and, I assume, a sanity check. For myself, I’ve always heard rumours that I wanted to become an academic, and rarely paid them overmuch attention.
“I mean,” she continued, “do you know what you want to do, what it is? It requires a sort of cold, full-on dedication now, of course. The gentleman-scholar doesn’t exist anymore.”
The chick had, naturally, got to the node of the matter. I’m aware that the gentleman-scholar doesn’t exist, that we’ve gone from Sliggers (see prior article) to sloggers, but I am young and foolish and, in my moments of reconciling myself to the Worship of Athena, I do like to think I could help to reverse that process.
In this article I will try and articulate how, by musing on what the academy was, what it is, and what it might become, in two more or less frightening versions of the future: in one of which I am a distinguished professor and probably the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, while in the other I have settled for becoming a strolling player, or something, and have not implemented my Plan to Save the Eggheads.
So we begin with what Athens was: et in Arcadia Minoo: the past world my tutor, correctly, intuited I am liable to sentimentalise. William Empson is lounging in bed with a couple of lady-boys and a Sheffield lecturer. CS Lewis is recovering from a hard evensong with the help of hot toddy. It is a golden morning, and a few golden minds are writing about the Golden Age of English Literature: “an age synonymous with the glory of two words, Aristocracy, and England” (thanks, CS). What distinguishes such a milieu? There are very few people there; some are extremely clever, and some are just the Earl of Colfax’s favourite nephew (see Trinity, ITV, out now on DVD). Very few of them are girls, partly because debutantes still exist (so that’s my ex-tutor catered for, I suppose). What is going for this age, other than the dress sense? It is this: the operation of a very powerful internal shame ethic. When one writes, one must write well what can be read well. Criticism is a kind of literature, not a sort of riot police force maintained by the taxpayer to curb literature’s excesses.
Only by our own era, of course, criticism – like every other arena of academic study – has become exactly that – a poor creature, bloated then straitjacketed by taxes, funded, and restricted, at every level. It is a historical period that is about to suffer, with the desolation of the higher education budget, intense withdrawal systems, but it has already done its damage. Scholars, no less than their gaily debt-gathering pupils, float about on mysterious money about which they know little and care nothing – on the academic level, unlike the undergraduate one, this ethereal benevolence does not come back to claim them in the form of debt. The fact is that very generous cumulative public funding makes the question of demand irrelevant to the publication of academic works. When academics could be trusted to enforce the laws of taste instead, the gap in necessary discriminatory control was filled.
When literary merit – which I would define, in the sphere of criticism, as a style obedient to the diktats of beauty and of clarity – became unfashionable, a curious situation was produced. The taxpayer was now supporting at the country’s universities a class of teachers to produce and publish work which could not conceivably interest him or her; jargonical, marginal, aggressively priced and pompously expressed.
It will be objected perhaps that I speak of the “literary” and the “critical” and yet apply my apparent disillusionment to all disciplines, including the sciences. I believe that the point self-evidently stands; it’s just that the cancer of elitist inexplicability, only in progress in the arts, subsumed the sciences rather longer ago. Science is fascinating and powerful, but there is a reason it is not the queen of dinner party discourse – the scientific community, well within recorded memory, decided, patchily then eventually conventionally, that an attractive writing style was, in their portfolio, a dispensable skill; so, to give energy to higher priorities, they dispensed with it. Rebels exist – Richard Dawkins’s maddest diatribes should and will still be read by a general public, because he is an excellent writer – but theirs is not the usual way.
In the context of the sciences this development is regrettable, as their skills become underappreciated and ever less competently taught at school level, laymen becoming, and staying, repelled by science very early on. But in the context of the arts, the abandonment of communication and elegance is more than this, it is – in a variety of thought where utilitarian value should not be of paramount importance – completely debilitating. Arts academics in the absence of taste become distinguished on the grounds of industry and originality. Industry means they put a lot of stuff on paper or maybe the internet, originality means they invert fashions and privilege the obscure over the good. A computer programme could fulfil all these functions; at times the last Vice-Chancellor of Oxford was, I recall, on the point of suggesting that it should do.
Here is my planned healing process; it comes in a simple step and later a more drastic one. First, it is not very hard to write interestingly and clearly, although when one is angry one tends to get a bit more interesting and a lot less clear; I apologise for the operation of that process within this article. Anyway, the scientists jettisoned, the humanities are jettisoning, the belles lettres because they developed a perception that style distracted energy from more important things. It doesn’t. Lucidity actually makes work easier to write as well as to read. Freud, Jung, Einstein and Rutherford were lucid. In the quasi-artistic worlds of political science and philosophy, Macchiavelli or Bertrand Russell have many lessons to teach to the aesthete. The tribe of academics at work on non-books for non-audiences, or as they would put it “monographs for supervisors”, are thereby leading harder and unhappier lives as a result of their doctrinaire idleness about style.
However, the regrafting of taste on a voluntary basis is unfortunately likely to be quite a slow process. I suggest that we, as a nation, encourage its secure advancement by, in the meantime, privatising all universities presses, thereby requiring every academic to seek some sort of commercial publisher. The internet would still exist as an output for the most doggedly vital, and yet commercially unattractive, research; the most recalcitrant biologists could cure malaria quietly on a nice blog somewhere; but they could abusing bookshelves while they were about it: unless of course they felt like expressing themselves in a way that would truly edify the public, incidentally repaying the debt they owed that public for their own education and careers.
The effects of this course of action would be alarming, especially in such an unruffled milieu as our beloved Oxford, but I believe ultimately beneficial. Supervisors and senior tutors would have to recommence rating and promoting their colleagues on quality in a general rather than a specialised sense. The university and the strange lands outwith it would begin to reflect each other a little more.
For the strange thing is that the legendary breed of jovial ivory tower dwellers, Lewises, Empsons, Trevor-Ropers, Bayleys, were actually more realistic, fleshly beings than the anaemic spectres who occupy their posts today. In the names of modernity, contemporaneity, originality and research rigour, academics today have firmly turned the ivory key; and if they do not have recourse to the Dinshaw Doctrine (they won’t, by the way), they may be turning it for the last time. In the post-Credit Crunch Crumpet landscape, the pillowing public money proved evanescent, the student debt powerfully unattractive to the young, and the intellectually enthusiastic sane enough to go anywhere but academia, I don’t see how the academy can retain any kind of primacy in education and interpretation. I don’t know whether the new priesthood will be teachers or TV personalities, but they won’t be hons, dons and smoking MA Oxons.
At a recent meeting of the Stubbs Society Sir Keith Thomas recently lamented the likely future downfall of academic history before popular biography. Well, Keithy, I say they get as they deserves.
Very old snatch of historical novel, 'Ctesiphon'
China. Imagine it. An obese idea that we have caught in ridiculous fragments, silken drapery in hideous colours, stock stories of a timid jaundiced people without number. A commonplace in Roman poetry. Flatterers have conquered China a thousand times in inexorable odes to please their patrons; satirists have sent unlikely lovers there; historians say nothing, because nothing can be said with integrity of a place so hulking and inconvenient and shapeless and powerful. The Emperor of China is the most powerful of men, to whom gods send tremulous emissaries; there, an enterprising bishop; at the other side, a talkative mystic. Gods learn lessons in majesty from that man. But men can learn nothing of him or from him; oceans of silk and steel, a dais higher than the Jacob’s Ladder of the Jews, hide him from our sight.
I am riding a brownish mule, one among many. The mules are our Emperors at present, even though one of the riders is an emperor himself. We are dazed men (we made the women stay behind). We no longer have a city, we scarcely have a path, but we are going to China, towards it anyway.
None of us know very much about the Chinamen. But of this we are sure: they do not adore one God. And we Persians, we Zoroastrians, have had quite enough of the No God But God, though we are said to have invented Him. The Jewish people whom we delivered from Babylon long, long ago have written ghastly legends of monarchs with monotonous names and persistent woes. More melancholy than Israel ever knew came to us in a shorter space than the life of a fine horse.
I want gods like those dancing Greek creatures, gods of a shining, animal court filled with light and temper. But the more morose, the more without pity, the bloodier God is, the more I know that there is only one of Him and He cannot stomach even lieutenants, even angels.
I am riding a brownish mule, one among many. The mules are our Emperors at present, even though one of the riders is an emperor himself. We are dazed men (we made the women stay behind). We no longer have a city, we scarcely have a path, but we are going to China, towards it anyway.
None of us know very much about the Chinamen. But of this we are sure: they do not adore one God. And we Persians, we Zoroastrians, have had quite enough of the No God But God, though we are said to have invented Him. The Jewish people whom we delivered from Babylon long, long ago have written ghastly legends of monarchs with monotonous names and persistent woes. More melancholy than Israel ever knew came to us in a shorter space than the life of a fine horse.
I want gods like those dancing Greek creatures, gods of a shining, animal court filled with light and temper. But the more morose, the more without pity, the bloodier God is, the more I know that there is only one of Him and He cannot stomach even lieutenants, even angels.
Tuesday 2 March 2010
Captain Arcadia Ep 1 Part 2
Rotterdam, some months later
(A bustling and mercantile thoroughfare, through which an old man in a long, black, fur-lined gown and a faintly disdainful looking, fashionably dressed young nobleman are winding their way.)
ERASMUS: Is my fair city less than to your liking, Mr Greville?
GREVILLE: The clouds upon my thoughts are glum enough already without being augmented by the…stench of moneychangers.
ERASMUS: You are a young man of uncompromising disposition, I see. What is that worries you so? The grave state of decrepitude in which modern learning self-evidently finds herself?
GREVILLE: My troubles are of a personal nature, Erasmus.
ERASMUS: Aha! A love affair.
GREVILLE: No, no. If you must know, it’s about my friend Philip Sidney…
ERASMUS: Ah yes, I remember him, a most accomplished and promising young gentleman. A scholar of Oxford, Christ Church, I believe? Is his mother not one of the Count of Leicester’s sisters?
GREVILLE: The point is, for months he’s been missing, no sign of him anywhere, and I received disturbing word from…well, from an unreliable source, but…
(Loud commotion and shouts of “Thief, thief!” A nearby stall is in utter commotion. A pale young man dressed in black, wearing a flashy opal ring, is trying to extricate himself from a particularly angry knot of people with a red faced burgher at its centre.)
MARLOWE: I hold a commission from, from, the con- con- sistory court at Rh-Rh-Rheims, I am a, a theological scholar, a scholar and a…
BURGHER: A red-handed thief! That’s my best opal, you degenerate, on order to the Duchess of Brabant, went missing four days back…
GREVILLE: What an extraordinary chance. That’s him, Erasmus, the man who said he might have bad news about Philip.
ERASMUS: Allow me to sort out this unfortunate situation. My good man, (he lays a restraining hand on the angry burgher’s shoulder) you have perhaps heard of my repute. I am Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam…
(The burgher punches Erasmus in the face and the sage falls over. Marlowe has gripped hold of Greville.)
MARLOWE: Ey, the old man’ll be just fine. Scram now, and we’ll talk about your friend. I know a nice safe ‘stablishment. Come on.
(They bolt away down an alley.)
(The camera follows them bolting down many side streets. At some point they rush past a shabbily dressed man in a wide-brimmed hat. He raises his head to look at them; it is Norton. He watches them pass, then sets off back the way he had come. Cut to an Unsavoury Boarding House, Marlowe and Greville entering.)
MARLOWE: (to landlady) Good day, Frau Geritzoon. I’ve brought a friend.
LANDLADY: He looks a better class than your usual run of dodgy Jesuits and thievin’ rentboys, Kit.
MARLOWE: I’m sure he appreciates the compliment, Frau Geritzoon. Now if I were you I’d get right down to the jewellers on Wilhelmstrasse.
LANDLADY: What you nattering about? I don’t need bawbies at my age.
MARLOWE: Mm, well, I think you’ll find yer man Desiderius in a bit of a fix.
LANDLADY: What? Dezzy’s got ‘imself in trouble again? Well, Kit Marlowe, I’m moving but if I find you’re at the bottom of this one… (She bustles out.)
GREVILLE: (astonished) ‘Dezzy’? Frau Geritzoon? That woman...Erasmus…
MARLOWE: Has been secretly married for decades, yeah. Now, Master Greville, just where were we?
GREVILLE: You’re the one who should be answering questions, you depraved little fop. You leant over to me back in the tavern, muttered “Sidney” and put your thumbs down. Are you saying it’s all up with Philip, and what is your information, exactly?
MARLOWE: (off hand) Jus’ this.
(He moves to a corner of the room with a battered travelling chest in it and kicks the unlocked trunk open, Greville craning after him.)
Don’ stand there lordling, light a taper.
GREVILLE: Show some damned respect.
MARLOWE: Do as I say.
(GREVILLE, white and sweaty with anger and trepidation, does indeed light a taper as Marlowe picks up a large object from the box. It comes under the light – a mud-splattered, once elegant saddle, with a coat of arms on it.)
GREVILLE: Christ save me! The Penshurst arms, Sidney’s blazon!
MARLOWE: Picked up the corpse of a horse fortnight back. Picked it up for a pound. Wouldn’t mind some remuner…
GREVILLE: Like hell it was a pound, you slimy bastard.
(He is very angry and pins Marlowe in a grip against the wall, letting the taper go fall. We see an unknown boot come down on it.)
OFFSTAGE HUSKILY FEMALE VOICE: Steady, boys. You could start a fire like that.
(Flash to the newcomer. Dressed in young man’s garments with a wide-brimmed riding hat exactly like the one Norton was wearing earlier is a tall, pale, light haired young woman with dark dark eyes and the evident lineaments of incredibly fabulous breasts. Penelope Deveureux – Stella – has arrived.)
(A bustling and mercantile thoroughfare, through which an old man in a long, black, fur-lined gown and a faintly disdainful looking, fashionably dressed young nobleman are winding their way.)
ERASMUS: Is my fair city less than to your liking, Mr Greville?
GREVILLE: The clouds upon my thoughts are glum enough already without being augmented by the…stench of moneychangers.
ERASMUS: You are a young man of uncompromising disposition, I see. What is that worries you so? The grave state of decrepitude in which modern learning self-evidently finds herself?
GREVILLE: My troubles are of a personal nature, Erasmus.
ERASMUS: Aha! A love affair.
GREVILLE: No, no. If you must know, it’s about my friend Philip Sidney…
ERASMUS: Ah yes, I remember him, a most accomplished and promising young gentleman. A scholar of Oxford, Christ Church, I believe? Is his mother not one of the Count of Leicester’s sisters?
GREVILLE: The point is, for months he’s been missing, no sign of him anywhere, and I received disturbing word from…well, from an unreliable source, but…
(Loud commotion and shouts of “Thief, thief!” A nearby stall is in utter commotion. A pale young man dressed in black, wearing a flashy opal ring, is trying to extricate himself from a particularly angry knot of people with a red faced burgher at its centre.)
MARLOWE: I hold a commission from, from, the con- con- sistory court at Rh-Rh-Rheims, I am a, a theological scholar, a scholar and a…
BURGHER: A red-handed thief! That’s my best opal, you degenerate, on order to the Duchess of Brabant, went missing four days back…
GREVILLE: What an extraordinary chance. That’s him, Erasmus, the man who said he might have bad news about Philip.
ERASMUS: Allow me to sort out this unfortunate situation. My good man, (he lays a restraining hand on the angry burgher’s shoulder) you have perhaps heard of my repute. I am Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam…
(The burgher punches Erasmus in the face and the sage falls over. Marlowe has gripped hold of Greville.)
MARLOWE: Ey, the old man’ll be just fine. Scram now, and we’ll talk about your friend. I know a nice safe ‘stablishment. Come on.
(They bolt away down an alley.)
(The camera follows them bolting down many side streets. At some point they rush past a shabbily dressed man in a wide-brimmed hat. He raises his head to look at them; it is Norton. He watches them pass, then sets off back the way he had come. Cut to an Unsavoury Boarding House, Marlowe and Greville entering.)
MARLOWE: (to landlady) Good day, Frau Geritzoon. I’ve brought a friend.
LANDLADY: He looks a better class than your usual run of dodgy Jesuits and thievin’ rentboys, Kit.
MARLOWE: I’m sure he appreciates the compliment, Frau Geritzoon. Now if I were you I’d get right down to the jewellers on Wilhelmstrasse.
LANDLADY: What you nattering about? I don’t need bawbies at my age.
MARLOWE: Mm, well, I think you’ll find yer man Desiderius in a bit of a fix.
LANDLADY: What? Dezzy’s got ‘imself in trouble again? Well, Kit Marlowe, I’m moving but if I find you’re at the bottom of this one… (She bustles out.)
GREVILLE: (astonished) ‘Dezzy’? Frau Geritzoon? That woman...Erasmus…
MARLOWE: Has been secretly married for decades, yeah. Now, Master Greville, just where were we?
GREVILLE: You’re the one who should be answering questions, you depraved little fop. You leant over to me back in the tavern, muttered “Sidney” and put your thumbs down. Are you saying it’s all up with Philip, and what is your information, exactly?
MARLOWE: (off hand) Jus’ this.
(He moves to a corner of the room with a battered travelling chest in it and kicks the unlocked trunk open, Greville craning after him.)
Don’ stand there lordling, light a taper.
GREVILLE: Show some damned respect.
MARLOWE: Do as I say.
(GREVILLE, white and sweaty with anger and trepidation, does indeed light a taper as Marlowe picks up a large object from the box. It comes under the light – a mud-splattered, once elegant saddle, with a coat of arms on it.)
GREVILLE: Christ save me! The Penshurst arms, Sidney’s blazon!
MARLOWE: Picked up the corpse of a horse fortnight back. Picked it up for a pound. Wouldn’t mind some remuner…
GREVILLE: Like hell it was a pound, you slimy bastard.
(He is very angry and pins Marlowe in a grip against the wall, letting the taper go fall. We see an unknown boot come down on it.)
OFFSTAGE HUSKILY FEMALE VOICE: Steady, boys. You could start a fire like that.
(Flash to the newcomer. Dressed in young man’s garments with a wide-brimmed riding hat exactly like the one Norton was wearing earlier is a tall, pale, light haired young woman with dark dark eyes and the evident lineaments of incredibly fabulous breasts. Penelope Deveureux – Stella – has arrived.)
I diversify to TV drama
CAPTAIN ARCADIA
Episode 1 – ‘Gap Year’
Mainz, 1572
(A shot of the cathedral. A bell tolling. A view of the city progressing from grand to seedy. A Low Tavern. Laughter and oaths in German. A red robe splashed with mud. Shot up to the shrewd face of a Roman Catholic prelate, in middle age. He is counting some gold coins as he crosses the threshold. A man in brown shouts.)
DRINKER: Lash up your purses, lads! Herr Kardinal is here…
CARDINAL: (smiling charmingly) I’m not playing tonight Hermann. I have a duty to attend to.
DRINKER: Duty? And this duty’s name…is it Gertrude?
(Shot of a repelled looking bar wench taking a step back, uproarious laughter.)
CARDINAL: Not tonight. Tell me, is the Englishman still here?
DRINKER: Herr Norton? Not likely, your Eminence. You were foolish to be so generous about that account!
SECOND DRINKER: The heretic bastard will be in Cologne by now.
CARDINAL: Cologne? I think that unlikely. Hey, Herr Albrecht, give my boys a drink. Cologne? No, I’m a spiritual gentleman, Liutpold, and my judgement is that by now…
(A hitherto silent man in a green tunic slams a knife in the table.)
MURDEROUS GOON: He’ll be in Hell, Herr Kardinal!
(Shot of a very, very exhausted man, at a roadside, pausing for breath. A flung stone smacks him in the back of the neck and he falls. Three men in green tunics surround him, pinning him to the ground. One pulls a knife.)
KILLER 1: Mistah Norton. No one defaults on Herr Kardinal, do you understand?
KILLER 2: Not without inconvenience, ja?
(Sound of hooves. The three functionaries cluster together suspiciously.)
KILLER 2: Looks like a real gentleman.
(The third killer, with the knife, laughs. We cut to the approaching rider, a young man on a white horse. Should be absolutely archetypal)
SIDNEY: Afternoon, sirs. My mount is tiring; are any of you carrying water?
(Caught in the midst of dubiety, the killers are silent and awkward.)
Come on. My German may be imperfect, but…
(The second killer pulls a pistol and shoots the white horse dead. Sidney sees the action, alights in time, elegantly, smashes the third killer out cold, takes the knife, and stabs the second killer dead through the back of the neck to the gorge. The first man runs for it. The horse aside, the killers have failed to kill anyone.)
NORTON: (gasping) Master Philip!
SIDNEY: What have we here? Lord Jesus, aren’t you the footman mother had dismissed from Penshurst for gambling? What the devil are you doing here?
NORTON: Still gambling, Master Philip.
To be continued
Episode 1 – ‘Gap Year’
Mainz, 1572
(A shot of the cathedral. A bell tolling. A view of the city progressing from grand to seedy. A Low Tavern. Laughter and oaths in German. A red robe splashed with mud. Shot up to the shrewd face of a Roman Catholic prelate, in middle age. He is counting some gold coins as he crosses the threshold. A man in brown shouts.)
DRINKER: Lash up your purses, lads! Herr Kardinal is here…
CARDINAL: (smiling charmingly) I’m not playing tonight Hermann. I have a duty to attend to.
DRINKER: Duty? And this duty’s name…is it Gertrude?
(Shot of a repelled looking bar wench taking a step back, uproarious laughter.)
CARDINAL: Not tonight. Tell me, is the Englishman still here?
DRINKER: Herr Norton? Not likely, your Eminence. You were foolish to be so generous about that account!
SECOND DRINKER: The heretic bastard will be in Cologne by now.
CARDINAL: Cologne? I think that unlikely. Hey, Herr Albrecht, give my boys a drink. Cologne? No, I’m a spiritual gentleman, Liutpold, and my judgement is that by now…
(A hitherto silent man in a green tunic slams a knife in the table.)
MURDEROUS GOON: He’ll be in Hell, Herr Kardinal!
(Shot of a very, very exhausted man, at a roadside, pausing for breath. A flung stone smacks him in the back of the neck and he falls. Three men in green tunics surround him, pinning him to the ground. One pulls a knife.)
KILLER 1: Mistah Norton. No one defaults on Herr Kardinal, do you understand?
KILLER 2: Not without inconvenience, ja?
(Sound of hooves. The three functionaries cluster together suspiciously.)
KILLER 2: Looks like a real gentleman.
(The third killer, with the knife, laughs. We cut to the approaching rider, a young man on a white horse. Should be absolutely archetypal)
SIDNEY: Afternoon, sirs. My mount is tiring; are any of you carrying water?
(Caught in the midst of dubiety, the killers are silent and awkward.)
Come on. My German may be imperfect, but…
(The second killer pulls a pistol and shoots the white horse dead. Sidney sees the action, alights in time, elegantly, smashes the third killer out cold, takes the knife, and stabs the second killer dead through the back of the neck to the gorge. The first man runs for it. The horse aside, the killers have failed to kill anyone.)
NORTON: (gasping) Master Philip!
SIDNEY: What have we here? Lord Jesus, aren’t you the footman mother had dismissed from Penshurst for gambling? What the devil are you doing here?
NORTON: Still gambling, Master Philip.
To be continued
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