“Why so?”
“It was my cloak, that was all—new green velvet, and home that morning from the cutter’s. Own him now a thief of opportunity.”
Mr. Sidney and Mr. Greville looked at one another gravely a moment, then burst into a shout of laughter.
Marlowe
“Prithee, Kit, pay me the pound you owe me.”
Mr. Christopher Marlowe, Master of Arts, playwright and rakehell, sprawled his arms upon the tavern table, and leered inebriously across it at the speaker. Behind him an open red lattice gave upon a sunny street alive with swarthy gold-ear-ringed mariners; before his sleepy eyes glowed, framed in the end of a black passage, like a picture in a diorama, a square of green banks and flashing waters webbed with rigging. The waters were the waters of Deptford Creek, and the tackle, or at least part of it, belonged to Drake’s ship, the Golden Hind, already, in this June of the year 1593, laid by for perpetuity at her Majesty’s command, as a memorial of her nation’s characteristic prowess.
Marlowe tinkled with his fingers an empty flagon on the table.
“A pound, Frank Archer?” quoth he in a slurred derisive voice. “Listen here—as empty as my pocket or your head. An I had a pound, I should know better what to do with it.”
The man he addressed, a fellow-actor in Lord Strange’s company, stood up sulkily before him. He was a neurotic player of women’s parts, and somehow uncleanly attractive to the sex he paraphrased. Perhaps he understood it enough to be feared by it—a lithe vicious creature, as white-faced as a girl, and subject to feminine spites and hysterics. He hated the playwright just now, not only because the latter owed him money, but because the two were rival suitors for the favour of some riverside Thaïs. It was a pitiful association, as who, regarding that other figure of bright genius, could not but feel. Not yet thirty, with blue eyes and honey hair, the face of an angel, the forehead of a sage, the indulgence of insatiable appetites had already marked down this Christopher Marlowe for death or insanity. He seemed to find no adequate satisfaction for his passions’ hunger short of feeding their ravenous fires, as Cellini fed the molten arteries of his Perseus, with dishes and quart measures.
“An you had one?” protested the player. “What! with your Edward still mouthing it at the ‘Rose’?—a damned play.”