“No one will look for me. All who know me will hear the account of my death at Deptford.”
“But someone besides us and the wife of Frazer will doubtless encounter thee.”
“Can I not lie safely housed until passage can be secured for the continent?”
“But in what quarter?”
“Far from the old familiar places, Peele,” answered Marlowe. “Not at the Black Bull, nor at Gerard’s Hall; nor at the Mermaid Tavern. And are these names to be but memories? Why, it is not two weeks since we secretly played Tancred and Gismund to the crowded galleries in the Bull; and then the dance around the fir-pole in the high-roofed hall at Gerard’s! That was not a month since, Peele. And verily my lips have not yet dried from the last glasses of fine old wine drank with thee, Nash, Jonson and the other merry wags at the round table within the bow-window at the Mermaid.”
Peele rocked backward and forward without speaking.
“Ah well, such frivolity should have ended long ago,” Marlowe went on, in a tone growing sterner with every word. “When mine enemy, Greene, dying of his surfeit of Rheinish wine and pickled herring, besought his friends in his Groat’s Worth of Wit [[note 35]] to abandon dissolute companions and in solitude nourish their spirit’s fire, why should I, despite his attack upon me, have not listened to his warning voice addressed to others, and not have waited for a finger dipped in blood to write, ‘Here endeth thy career?’”
A pause followed in which no one spoke, and again he continued: “’Tis well that this has happened. Without it what could have stayed me from wasting the hours which henceforth can be spent only in intellectual effort? Now the devil is chained. I can not even sell my soul to him. The world with its temptations lieth as distant as the fields of Trasymene. Is it not a subject for congratulation? What campaigns may I not enter; what conquests may I not gain?”
With the egotism of a god, knowing himself, and the source from which he drew his inspiration, he continued his torrent of words:
“Tamburlaine was written with the collar of the university about my neck; Faustus, while my hatred of the existing laws designed to chain one’s belief, prevented a just appreciation of true religion; the Massacre of Paris, with my mind disturbed from the effects of continuous dissipation; Hero and Leander, while deep in Love’s young dream; and so on with the list. But now what is there to clog or muddy the fountains? Is my mind not broader; are not the impediments to studious application and undisturbed contemplation removed? For twenty, thirty, yea forty or fifty years, what is before me but the opportunity to produce immortal and transcendent work? Nay, give me ten years in solitude, O thou dread force, and under my hand all form, all thought, shall find expression in written words!”