The bloody book of law,
You shall yourself read, in the bitter letter,
After your own sense.
—Othello, i, 3.
On the night of the murder in the old Deptford tavern the man who was to profit most from the false shadows thrown by the crime and its concealment was at the Boar’s Head in London. This man was William Shakespere. Without his volition and unknown to himself the crown of immortality was being set upon his brows. Just as unconsciously moved the hands that placed it there. Had the placing of it been designed; had the person who has worn it all these centuries felt its presence and coveted it, possibly all cloud that has since obscured his title might have been removed; but the actors were only puppets in the hands of the blind goddess of Mischance. The vital flaws remain, and have been pointed out by the searchers. Their genuineness has been demonstrated, but the source of title has been misapprehended. The falsifying of the record of the crime at Deptford being discovered, the tracing of the title through a deep channel to its true fountain head is a task easy of accomplishment. It leads to Christopher Marlowe.
With Shakespere were two others, whose lives were inseparably interwoven with that of his own and with Marlowe’s. One was George Peele, the dramatist, the other was Christopher Tamworth, the lawyer of Gray’s Inn.
The Eastcheap tavern, while frequently the gathering place for roysterers, was also a known resort for strolling players, pamphleteers, dramatists and other men of genius and ambition, who were looked upon with suspicion by a government that imagined greater danger from a middle class with intellect and ability of expression than from a powerful nobility, or an ignorant multitude of serfs.
At times, crowds in bacchanalian riot burnt out the hours of the night; again the peace of a cloister pervaded there, and from the lower bay, and higher dormer windows the lights of workers’ candles gleamed. Eastcheap Street might rattle with tumbrils, carts and horses’ hoofs, and the air be shattered by the cries of costard mongers, tooting of hautboys, or the ringing of bellmen, still the thick walls of the Boar’s Head enticed within them those who worked out their deliverance in solitary effort and meditation.
The three men were in a spacious room at the rear corner of one of the upper stories of the famous tavern. One window opening through the thick stone wall, faced the church-yard of St. Michaels with its drooping trees, its tenants of near three hundred years of burial, and its stately edifice wherein the fishmongers and butchers from near shops and stalls congregated. Clambering vines rooted in rich soil, framed this deep and narrow window in green; and in breezy hours sent to the ears of indwellers a rustle sweetly suggestive of the far distant woods of Kent or Surrey. In the wall facing Crooked Lane another window overlooked a traveled way so narrow that hands outstretched from facing windows on either side could clasp each other. On the pavement below, a foot passer might squeeze by a costard monger’s cart, but two carts abreast could not pass. Projecting platforms, under fronting doors with narrow stairs descending to the street, and boards thrust out from windows whereon hung linen drying, or boxed plants, assisted in obscuring the light.
The room was the living apartment of George Peele, and for several years during his separation from his wife, had been the retreat of that genius, where in intervals between mad dissipations he had written “The Famous Chronicle History of King Edward the First.” The innate taste of this individual, as displayed in the richness of the imagery that characterized his plays, could not but reveal itself in the external surroundings over which he had control. His purse had never been sufficiently distended for him to contract for luxurious apartments, or at least distended long enough for him to pause in the wild revel which always followed close on the heels of the receipt of money for a play, to consider any question of comfort in the near future, consequently both in seasons of poverty and moments of affluence this one room at the Boar’s Head was his permanent headquarters.
The blackened ceiling remained as he had found it; the ground work of dingy wall on all sides had not been changed except by the articles hung against it, and these were as varied as a prodigal hand could gather. A magnificent piece of tapestry from the looms of Flanders, bearing upon its blue groundwork the red figure of a horse and crowned rider, covered one entire side of the room. It was said to have been the gift of Queen Elizabeth, for whom, in 1584, Peele had written the comedy of “The Arraignment of Paris,” and had been bestowed after her hearing of the poet’s fancy for the hanging as he had first seen it in the banqueting house of the royal palace at Whitehall. On low stands before it were two black Greek vases of great value.
Against another wall were two long halbards, crossed just below their heads, whose bright steel flashed back the light of the lamp. The ends of their poles touched the floor, and between them was a long Norman hauberk of trellised plate and a kite-shaped shield as rusty as six centuries could make them. The chimney place was narrow, deep and black. Great brass firedogs was all that it contained at that season. Above it the shelf, formed by the receding of the chimney, was crowded with bronze and white marble statuettes, among which, one of the queen overtopped the others of more ancient sculpture.
The low iron bedstead of rude manufacture, almost concealed in the recess formed by the projecting chimney, was evidently a fixture. Of the same category were the chairs and the table. Over the latter a lamp designed to aid a scholar in his lucubrations, burned steadily from a bracket in the wall.