Oliver, we may remember, was in the employ of a fat and slothful stationer in St Paul's Churchyard, who when asked for a book 'never stirs his head . . . but stands stone still, and speakes not a word: onely with his little finger points backwards to his boy'. By 1587, the 'boy' had grown into a handsome young man, adept at stepping nimbly out of range of the little finger of the 'Puddinge of St Paul's'. The one surviving portrait shows him clear-skinned and clean-shaven; his large eyes captured at the moment they dart to look at something over the viewer's shoulder. It shows someone quick, energetic, alert. Dark, rather wayward hair curls down just over his ears. He is dressed simply, in the manner of a scholar - no ruff, just a white linen shirt with a falling collar, a simple black jerkin - and he bends over a writing desk, surrounded by the paraphernalia of a scribe. The painting is anonymous, but Flemish in style, and could very well have been painted in Antwerp, for according to Bernard Rosine, Oliver was already, by the mid-i58os, part of Sir Francis Walsingham's spy web, working mainly in the Low Countries. His natural cover as a St Paul's stationer helped give him access to Roman Catholic book-smuggling rings, perhaps posing as a courier willing to transport 'thornie and insolent bookes' and anti-government propaganda printed in Middelburg and Antwerp, packaged in with legitimate book orders.*
Oliver appears to have spent some months in Antwerp at the Trognesius publishing house (the Puddinge being easily placable by a substitute boy to respond to his flabby-fingered commands). Antwerp had recently fallen to the Duke of Parma and so was enemy territory to the English, but Oliver's native French meant he could pass himself off as a Walloon. Rosine speculates that he was working on the Colloquia et Dictionariolum Septem Linguarum, a handy phrase book for merchants that gives the equivalent of such utterances as 'You did promise me to give me money two months ago' in English, Flemish, German, Latin, French, Spanish and Italian, and was published by Trognesius in 1587.
There was a growing demand for such works. Gentlemen and scholars could travel on their Latin, but what of their serving-men who had to go shopping in foreign markets, arrange for horses to be stabled, and negotiate with inn-keepers? How did merchants from different lands communicate? This is especially pertinent when people of different nationalities were trying to work together in dangerous situations, where efficient communication was crucial. Crews of ships on the high seas were often a mixed bunch - the great Spanish Armada comprised 'captains and crews drawn from many lands and speaking many tongues'. William Blandy described Parma's army as consisting of the 'froth and scomme of many nations', and the Earl of Leicester warned his troops in 1586 that 'whereas sundrie nations are to serve with us in these warres, so as through diversitie of languages occasion of many controversies may arise'. Yet in 1607 Thomas Dekker described a band of English war veterans as a 'mingle mangle of countries, a confusion of languages, yet all understanding each other' - armies seem to have developed what Nick de Somogyi calls an Esperanto of War. Merchants, too, developed pidgins, like 'franco piccolo , a mainly Italian hybrid which used only infinitive verbs, and was the language of commerce through much of the Mediterranean. Many were beginning to resort to early phrase books such as the Colloquia et Dictionariolum Septem Linguarum, providing ready employment in publishing houses for polyglots like Oliver (and later also Kit). In early 1588 Oliver was at work on Cornells Kiliaan's Dictionorium Teutonico-Latinum, which was being expanded from its original two languages to include French, English, Saxon, Spanish, Italian and Greek. It was published by the Plantin Press in Antwerp, and here we see the reason for Oliver's (or rather Walsingham's) interest.
Plantin was the leading publisher of his generation. From his presses had come the great maps of Abraham Ortelius, as well as thousands of humanist, religious and academic works which were distributed across Europe and as far as the New World. He was a Catholic, yet managed enough professional flexibility to be (at times simultaneously in different combinations) official printer to the King of Spain, the City of Antwerp, the States General of the Protestant northern provinces, and the Duke of Anjou - an interesting place, then, for Walsingham to have a pair of eyes, especially after the Spanish had recaptured Antwerp. Oliver obliged with a steady stream of intelligence, at one point filching (though probably not from Plantin presses) a copy of a broadside 'Declaration', printed in English and denouncing Elizabeth as a tyrant, being made for distribution when the Armada landed. He also built up an extensive network of contacts in Antwerp, which were to prove invaluable to Kit in 1593
It is not known whether Kit had anything to do with Oliver's recruitment, but it would appear that sometime in 1588, possibly extending into 1589, the two were together on government work in Italy. They travelled using forged documents bought off a Jasper Himselroy, who traded in passports at the sign of the Gilded Head in Antwerp. It is unclear why Kit and Oliver travelled together. They may have been on separate but coincidental missions, or perhaps acting as couriers for something so important that back-up was needed to ensure it got through; it may have been for safety, or simply as part of their cover - people travelling together were less suspicious to the 'searchers' who watched foreign comings and goings. The two journeyed, for some of the time at least, as a pair of Catholic priests on pilgrimage to the tomb of St Anthony in Padua. Though perhaps arriving in Padua as couriers, they stayed on as intelligencers. A young student called John Wroth (or Wrothe) was beginning to supply Walsingham with information, and diligent, double-checking Sir Francis wanted a second view on the lad, especially as his agent Stephen Powle, who had probably recruited Wroth, was about to leave the Veneto. Sir Francis always double-checked. For him no action was without a motive, and no motive was above suspicion.
There were broader reasons why agents were needed in Italy. Tension with Spain and fear of invasion were intensifying - by July 1588 the Armada would be off the English coast. Walsingham was increasing the number of spies on the Continent to glean information on naval movements and invasion plans. (It is little wonder that Sir Francis Drake continued with his famous game of bowls. Walsingham's spies were so numerous and industrious that the arrival of the Armada could have come with little surprise.) Italy - the communication line between Madrid, the Vatican and the Holy Roman Emperor in Bohemia, and in large part occupied by the Spanish - was the 'best listening post in Europe', and Walsingham ran a number of agents there, especially in Venice and Padua. The astrologer Dr Dee, then living in Bohemia, had predicted to the Emperor Rudolph that 1588 would be a year of astrological upheaval, together with violent and abnormal storms, which would cause the fall of a mighty Empire. Rudolph was in correspondence with sorcerers throughout Europe, and soon astrologers across the Continent (perhaps because of Dee's high reputation) were warning of terrible tempests and convulsions of earth and ocean. The espionage historian Richard Deacon puts this down to clever exploitation by Walsingham and perhaps by Dee himself, maintaining that it amounted to a subtle psychological warfare, aimed at spreading gloom and despondency. And indeed, the prophecies affected recruitment in Spain, and there were desertions from the fleet.
Dr Dee was not averse to using occult means to practical ends. Some historians believe that his mysterious sidekick Edward Kelley's visions as a 'skryer' (medium) were complex manipulations, or coded espionage messages. Kelley had been in Walsingham's employ since the early 1580s to spy on a Polish prince, Lord Albert Laski, with whom he and Dee were closely associated, and possibly to keep an eye on the great conjuror himself. Dee's espionage connections with both Walsingham and his predecessor as spymaster, Lord Burghley, went back even further. In the early 1560s he had found an extremely rare copy of the Steganographia by the medieval abbot and early cryptographer Johannes Trithemius. This was at the very least a complex book of ciphers and codes, but Dee seems excitedly to have believed that it held the clue to transmitting messages over long distances by occult means. This was not dismissed lightly in an age when intelligence could be communicated only as fast as a man or a horse could stumble along appalling (and often impassable) roads. The occult was taken seriously both in espionage and conspiracy - in 1578 the Privy Council had been extremely concerned by the discovery in a stable of three wax images pierced with hog's-hair bristles, one labelled 'Elizabeth'; and the spy and writer Giordano Bruno once plotted to overthrow the papacy by magic.
There is a possible link between the magical duo in Bohemia, and the two fake pilgrims in Padua. The Jesuit scholar Christopher Parkins was in Padua when Kit and Oliver arrived. He had been falsely accused by Kelley of plotting against Elizabeth, but soon after Kit and Oliver were in Padua was himself filing reports on Kelley from Prague, not to Walsingham, but to Sir Robert Cecil. Oliver later became directly involved in the line of communication between Cecil and Prague, so was perhaps also working for Cecil in Italy. If this is so, then Kit's mission to Padua brought him a step closer to being caught up in Cecil's intrigue, and the darkness that would soon engulf him was already beginning to gather.
Kit and Oliver's initial disguise as Catholic priests eased their way, but was not entirely necessary. Although travel in most of Italy was not easy for Protestant Englishmen, it was tolerated in the Venetian republic (which included the cities of Verona and Padua) and in other independent territories in the north. There were English students at the University of Padua and English merchants traded with Venice. Rich, daring young gentlemen like Harrie Cavendish passed through Italy on their way to Constantinople, partly for business, partly for pleasure. The clown Will Kemp (with whom Kit had worked with Leicester's Men) had not only toured in Italy, but was famous there. Kit's friend Tom Nashe - who was in the area at the same time as Kit and Oliver, and could very well have travelled with them - relates that when in Bergamo he had occasion 'to light in fellowship with that famous Francattip harlequin', with whom he talked about English theatre and who asked him if he knew the clown 'Signior Chiarlatano Kempino' (Will Kemp). On saying that he did, Nashe found himself embraced and feted.
Kit may very well have been with Tom Nashe at Bergamo watching commedia dell'arte, the vigorous, improvised Italian theatre which, together with that in England, was remarkable in that it was acted by professionals (the name means 'comedy of the profession'). Certainly he would have seen it in Venice and Padua. The stylish masks and costumes and energetic performances of the Italian actors fascinated him, and strands of commedia would run through his work for years to come. Some of the stock characters - the ancient Pantalone, the pedantic lawyer or doctor, the braggart soldier, dei zanni (the clumsy, comic servants) - would infiltrate his work. The pedantic Holo-fernes and the braggart Don Adriano de Armado in Love's Labour's Lost come immediately to mind, as do the 'Pedant' in The Taming of the Shrew, and perhaps even fussy Polonius in Hamlet and the foolish doctor in Comedy of Errors. Lucentio in The Taming of the Shrew refers to Gremio as an 'old pantaloon' (one of the first recorded uses of the word in English), and the sixth age of man is 'the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,/With spectacles on is nose . . .' (As You Like It II vii 158-9). The first use of the word 'zany' in English is recorded as 'Some carry-tale, some please-man, some slight zany' (Love's Labours Lost V ii 463), and this is soon followed by 'these set kind of fools no better than the fools' zanies' (Twelfth Night I v 84).
The snappy banter of echoed quips between Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, between Berowne and Katharine in Love's Labour's Lost, and between a host of masters and comic servants in other plays is a strong commedia convention, as are rhyming couplets to signify the end of a scene or speech. Allardyce Nicoll sees at least four commedia dell'arte masks described in Jacques' 'Seven Ages of Man' speech in As You Like It. A renowned scholar of the genre, Kathleen Lea considers the behaviour of Helena, Hermia, Demetrius and Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream as typical of the vicious circle of enchanted lovers in commedia, and gives special mention to Italian sources for The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Comedy of Errors which were not available in English at the time. The plays of mistaken doubles in Comedy of Errors, Lea points out, is a common commedia feature, and it is commedia that provided Kit's amplifications to the classical source of the play, Plautus' Menaechmi. Kit had already translated and adapted the Menaechmi for Bradstriet's men in the Low Countries. As he wrote Comedy of Errors sometime in 1592, he was perhaps subtly admonishing his would-be collaborator, the 'upstart Crow' Will Shakespere by basing the play on Latin and Italian sources, neither of which Will could read.
The early twentieth-century critic Edward Gordon Craig wrote: 'The naturalness [by which he means popular appeal] of the Dramas was, I believe, wafted to England from Italy. Italy had awakened . . . to a new sense of Drama. It was red hot, spontaneous, natural. . . It was good talk, wonderful patter.' Kit's experiences in Italy were to breathe fire into English theatre. Interestingly, Craig also maintains - nearly a hundred years before scholars would express similar opinions - that 'the Dramas were created . . . in close collaboration with the Manager of the Theatre and with the actors . . . I believe that a glimpse of the manuscript of the plays would reveal a mass of corrections, additions, and cuts made in several handwritings. I believe that the improvisators - and the comedians of that day were great improvisators - contributed a great deal to the Comedies, and not a little to several of the Tragedies.' Of course, sadly, from Tamburlaine to The Tempest, not a single manuscript remains to bear this out.
It is clear that Tom Nashe did not share Kit's enthusiasm for commedia dell'arte- or the passion that was already beginning to grip Kit about Italy. The land that Fynes Moryson called the Queen of Nations, Tom Nashe dismissed as 'the Academie of man-slaughter, the sporting place of murther, The Apothecary shop of poyson for all Nations'. In his novella The Unfortunate Traveller, an English earl who has been banished there tells the hero Jack that young men bring from Italy only 'the art of atheisme, the art of epicurising, the art of whoring, the art of poysoning, the art of Sodomitire' (at least four of which arts rather appealed to Kit). The theatre Nashe maligns as comprising 'a sort of squirting baudie [bawdy] Comedians, that have whores and common Curtizens [courtesans] to playe womens partes'. In England, of course, women's parts were played by boys. Many English travellers were shocked to see real women on stage in Italy, and some, like Thomas Coryate, agreeably surprised that they performed women's parts 'with as good a grace, action, gesture . . . as ever I saw any masculine Actor'.
But Nashe was having none of it. He went on to complain of actors who would do anything for a laugh; that this was a theatre where Pantaloons and Zanies replaced the more 'stately' English scenes of emperors, kings and princes. Tom Nashe was becoming a little stuffy, and Kit was beginning to drift apart from his once rebellious university friend.
They are pictured at the Saggitari, an airy inn in Bergamo: scrawny Tom Nashe with his buck teeth and 'mutinous unfixed hair' (Kit once quipped that when Nashe was naked he looked for all the world like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife), complaining of the dangers and horrors of Italy, while Kit goads him on about women players.* They sit at a table 'spread with white cloathe, strewed with flowers and figge leaves', eating the common Italian fare of huge chunks of white bread, with 'a great Charger full of hearbes, and a little oyle mixed therein', trying for the first time 'the hinder parts of frogs' and snails, or settling for a scrap of roast meat with a delicate Savore sauce, which the traveller Fynes Moryson describes as 'slices of bread steeped in broath, with as many Walnuts, and some few leaves of Marjoram, beaten in a morter, and mingled therewith, together with thejuyce of Gooseberries'. A fine feast, it seems, despite the fact that the meagreness of portions in Italy (apart from bread and salad) generally troubled guzzling northern travellers - though one William Lithgow notes that when he could not finish a meal, he was given leftovers as 'fragments . . . wrapt up in cleane paper'. Like Kit and Tom Nashe, Lithgow enjoyed large quantities of a local wine called Lachrime Christi, complaining: 'I drew so hard at that same weeping Wine, till I found my purse began to weepe also'. Norlet Boyd wonders whether in these bottles lay the inspiration for Tom Nashe's work Christ's Tears over Jerusalem* Kit certainly already knew and enjoyed the wine, listing it among the 'dainties of the world' in the second Tamburlaine, calling it 'liquid gold' (2 Tamburlaine I vi 93-6).
It is around this time that Oliver Laurens began to write the travel journal that helps us keep track of Kit over the next few decades† He mentions heavy rains and the flood of the Po, which helps date the beginning of his account as 1588. The journal now comprises some 220 leaves of paper, of various sorts, in a folio volume bound in crimson morocco with light gold tooling. The binding dates from at least a century after the journal was written, and the pages would appear to have been gathered from various sources - they are in sequence, but vary greatly in quality of preservation, and there are obviously sections missing. It is written throughout in a small neat English Secretary Hand, with none of the innovation of the Italic script that was taking over Tudor handwriting, but with its own quiet flourishes: a long tendril dropping from the f, a 'p' like a small comet, an elegant double-curved capital T. It's an energetic hand, but one that speaks reliability, constancy and self-control. Parts of the journal are in cipher. There are occasional simple ink illustrations.
Nothing is known of the history of the volume until the late eighteenth century when it appears in France as part of the effects of an elderly Comte, who did not survive the Revolution. For nearly a century it remained the heirloom of a petit bourgeois Parisian family (apparently unread), until as the 'Diary of the Clerk to Mr Shakespere', it was shown to the English ambassador sometime in the 1880s. It then disappeared again (Dr Rosine thinks the ambassador either bought it, or tried to suppress it), and resurfaced after the Second World War when it was catalogued as part of the Huguenot archive at the Bernhardt Institute (the later pages contain some reminiscences of Oliver's childhood, and his account of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre).
Oliver relates that soon after arriving in Padua, the two abandoned their clerical cover and 'took a lodging fit to entertain such friends as time in the fair city shall beget'. The 'studious universitie' there - older than any Oxford or Cambridge college - was famous for its religious tolerance and liberal ethos, and drew academics from all over Europe. Sir Francis Walsingham had studied law, drunk wine and played the clavichord there in the 1550s, Kit's friend Rosencrance of Elsinore had recently arrived and there were Dutchmen and Germans, students from Illyria, from Bohemia and from Cyprus across the seas. 'More students of forraine and remote nations doe live in Padua,' wrote the 'Odcombian Leg-Stretcher' Thomas Coryate, 'than in any one University in Christendom'. They were organised into nearly thirty different nationes, each permitted to recreate the customs and traditions of the homeland, each feeding a little of its essence into the distillation of European life that was Padua. Some of the greatest minds in the world were there, along with freelance tutors and hosts of young men who came not for the official Studium but simply to attend a few lectures, follow a short course, learn Italian, or plunge into the cosmopolitan pool. Those who were rich enough or had the right connections were taken up into elite literary circles of Venetian aristocrats and local Florentines. Horse-riding, fencing and dancing were just as enthusiastically pursued as learning, and the pace never faltered, with banquets and tournaments, masquerades and theatre. Kit was in his element.
Oliver - on his first visit to Italy - was awestruck by the light and colour. He writes wonderingly of the brightly painted and patterned walls, of arched stone arcades that keep off 'the greatest raine' and provide shadowy corners for assignations, of the five market places - one where 'Gentlemen and Students of alle nationes meet and walk' - and of the Church of St Anthony, its clustered domes and spindly turrets 'swift transporting me in mind to Constantynople, as on Pacolets horse' (Pacolet was a dwarf magician in the old romance of Valentine and Orson. His magical horse could convey you instantly anywhere you desired to go. St Anthony's in Padua is indeed oriental in appearance - though how Oliver could apparently be reminded of Santa Sofia and the Seraglio is unclear, as he had never been to Constantinople). He delighted in the practicalities of their daily life, of the boy Biondello who carried their purchases back in a basket from the market-place for a soil, of the ancient 'Hostesse' from whom they rented their chamber and who found them fine clean 'tableclothes, napkins, sheetes and towels and dresseth our meat in the bargain'. He effuses about the 'sweete Ayre and sunny hills' of the nearby countryside and tells us of Fat's going off to sweat in the waters of Abano, 'which he had heard of Seignyeur de Montaygne' - the thermal springs at Abano, which flow out of the ground at 87°C, had been famed since Roman times. Montaigne had visited them in 1580, and had been impressed by the fact that the very rocks steamed, and had holes pierced in them so that 'a man may lie down in the exhalations and get into a heat and perspiration, which he does very quickly'. He had no doubt recommended them to Kit when they met in Plombieres.
Oliver is perhaps just a little too lyrical. Both Montaigne and Fynes Moryson complained that the arcades of Padua made the streets too narrow, and the Frenchman thought the city downright ugly. The oft-mournful William Lithgow moaned that it was 'the most melancholy City in Europe', that the students committed murders 'with gun-shot or else stilletoes', and that (as in all of Italy, he thought) sodomy was rife: 'A monstrous filthinesse, and yet to them a pleasant pastime, making songs and singing sonets of the beauty and pleasure of their Bardassi, or bugger'd boyes'. Fynes Moryson also notes the high incidence of murder between students, and puts it down to the excessive liberality of the authorities, as 'man-slaiers are only punished with banishment'. There is truth in all this. Murder it was that drove them from Padua, and Kit was taking to buggery with relish.
The Consiliarius of the English 'nation' at the time was Richard Willoughby, who had been a fellow at Kit's Cambridge college but had converted to Catholicism and left the country. Gregarious and clever, he entertained most leading Englishmen in Padua, occasionally supplied intelligence himself, and later became a good friend of Galileo. He also offered ingress to smart circles. Kit's spark and easy wit went to work. Oliver writes of a visit to a Venetian palazzo which is draped with purple silks and tapestries, where they recline on 'Turkey cushions boss'd with pearl'; and of another to the villa on the mainland built by Palladio for the brothers Barbaro (Daniele, a humanist scholar, and Marcantonio, Venetian ambassador and amateur sculptor) surrounded by forests and fine gardens. Here he marvels at how Veronese's trompe-l'ceil mural landscapes blend perfectly with the real vistas, how the music played in the hall escapes into the evening air to mingle with birdsong, how the breeze is so soft that it does not even move the leaves. At night the moon shines bright on the courtyard, and when it is shaded by a cloud, candlelight gently seeps out from the hall to take its place. All is poise and quiet harmony.
Palladio had created such perfectly proportioned villas for a Venetian aristocracy that was beginning to turn away from the merchant life, which had made it so rich, to the pleasures of reading and culture and the delights of a country setting. Summer villas appeared all around the Veneto, and especially along the Brenta river which connects Venice and Padua. Some scholars see these mansions as the image for Portia's Belmont in The Merchant of Venice, citing the scene where Portia despatches her servant Balthazar to Padua by the Venice ferry. Contrary to the opinions of those who snigger at Kit's accuracy in these things, ferries did indeed ply the Brenta daily between the two cities. Various travellers of the time note the lock system (which is still in use) and mention boats with arched hatches at the back, sometimes covered in tapestry, and with cushions strewn about for comfort. Other candidates for Belmont include a villa in the town of Montebello, twenty miles from Venice (Portia and Nerissa travel to Venice by carriage with a 'haste away/For we must twenty miles to-day'), and the Villa Barbaro, which Oliver evokes so beautifully, and which is near the town of Montebelluna (the Roman Mons Bellonae).
Oliver also mentions a visit to the trimmed, formal gardens of the Conte Guisti in Verona, where, hollowed into a mountain below the Belvedere, is a chapel, nowadays ignored and derelict, that as Friar Laurence's cell and scene for a secret tryst and marriage seems far more authentic than other so-called 'sites' of Romeo and Juliet offered up to tourists. At this point Oliver's narrative is lost to us. A few fragments remain on sheets that show substantial water damage (the account resumes on different paper a few years later). One passage refers to a journey to Rome, and another to Milan, though these may have been written during a subsequent visit. Although Milan enjoyed a measure of independence, the Duke was sympathetic to the Spanish, and Rome would have been even more dangerous for Protestants to visit. Yet there is some evidence in Kit's works of a journey to both cities. A. J. Hoenselaars notes that Kit's depiction of Rome in Doctor Faustus has few equals in later drama; and A. D. Wraight argues that the 'high pyramides,/Which Julius Caesar brought from Africa' (Faustus II 853-7), again mentioned in Sonnet 123 as 'Thy pyramids built up with newer might/To me are nothing novel, nothing strange' dates his visit to Rome as 1589, when the fourth of these obelisks was newly erected and causing some stir among travellers. A visit to Milan may be detected in the scene in The Taming of the Shrew where a cultured lord shows the drunken tinker Sly his art gallery and tells him:
We'll show thee Io as she was a maid,
And how she was beguiled and surprised,
As lively painted as the deed was done.
(The Taming of the Shrew, Induction ii 52-4)
Some argue the lines are inspired by first-hand knowledge of Correggio's Io and Jupiter, which was on view at the palazzo of the sculptors Leoni and Son in Milan from 1585 to 1600. It is also tempting to see the same lord's references to his 'wanton pictures', and the mention of 'This senior-junior, giant dwarf Dan Cupid' (Love's Labour's Lost III i 170) as an indication that Kit had seen Giulio Romano's extraordinarily erotic frescos adorning the Sala di Amore e Psiche, and his terrifying gigan-tomachy (complete with huge putti) splayed across the walls and vault of the Sala dei Giganti, both in the Palazzo Te in Mantua (the first folio has 'This signior Junio's gyant dwarfe', which could be glossed as 'This signior Julio's giant dwarf). Romano's frequent portayal of stricken youths, such as in Hylas carried off by the Nymphs and The Death of Adonis very probably inspired the rich poetry of Kit's Hero and Leander, and his vivid pictures of the Trojan War are described at length and in detail in The Rape of Lucrece, all of which seems to indicate a visit to Mantua. But Oliver is disappointingly mute on this point, or his account is lost.
He does, however, recount the experience that led to their sudden flight from Padua. In a tussle one hot night near the Piazza del Erbe, Kit killed a young German student called Walter Hoochspier. This was not a duel conducted according to formal Italian rules. It was sudden and disordered. The formal steps of picking a quarrel and conventions of combat had been codified earlier in the century, and were taught at the popular fencing schools in Padua. They were laid out in manuals such as Muzio Giustinopolitano's II Duello, which was later plagiarised in an almost direct translation into English by the London fencing master, Vincentio Saviolo, and became much used by English dramatists. Kit mocks these rules through Touchstone's progression from the 'retort courteous' and the 'reply churlish' to 'countercheck quarrelsome' and the 'lie direct', in As You Like It, and they inform behaviour in the duels and encounters in Romeo and Juliet. Tybalt fights by a 'book of arithmetic', he 'fights as you sing prick-song: keeps time, distance and proportion; he rests his minim rests, one, two, and a third in your bosom' (Romeo and Juliet II iv 20—3).
But the ritual and pretty geometry of the fencing schools did not necessarily transfer to the street. Fencing masters and writers of manuals had it in their own interests to stress formality and convention, but in the anarchy of alley assaults, in fury, in battery and battle to the death, rules gave way to dirty tricks and all-in fighting. Heads were smashed, bodies pinned to the ground, testicles crushed, limbs slashed and severed. And Kit's hot temper served him ill. The circumstances of his fight are unclear, as we have only part of Oliver's account (it is in the water-damaged section of the bound journal), but it would appear to have something to do with Rosencrance, who had known Hoochspier in Wittenberg. Perhaps it is at this point that Kit found out about Rosencrance's treachery in blowing his cover at Elsinore. Kit was the betrayer betrayed, the dissembler duped, and angry about it. But it is more likely the cause was immediate - rivalry for a woman, or a taunt about his 'Bardasso' that flashed Kit into a fury. Whatever his motive, he pursued the Dane down one of the dark, arcaded alleys leading off the piazza towards the Jewish quarter, and attacked him without warning. There are shouts, confusion. Daggers flash, it happens too suddenly for swords. Hoochspier intervenes, closing with Kit and warding off a dagger-thrust with his left hand. Kit stabs twice, wounding Hoochspier down his right side, then severing an artery in the throat. No-one knows quite what is happening until movement and bodies subside. And only then comes the adrenaline rush. In the panic Kit forgets that 'man-slaiers are only punished with banishment', or perhaps he is simply not as well-informed as Fynes Moryson.
Kit and Oliver fled Padua immediately, by horse under bright moonlight to Venice, where at dawn the next day they boarded the first ship that would take them, the Tiger bound for Aleppo.
This was probably not the 200-ton Tiger under Captain John Bostocke, a noble ship of the Queen's fleet that had helped withstand the Armada the previous summer. Given subsequent events, it is more likely 'the rotten carcass of a bark' of the same name commanded by the Dutchman Captain Barnestrawe (probably an anglicising of Boonstra), who 'was not regarded by the Englishe men but greatlye reviled and called copernose and . . . was fitter to drincke ale than to be a Captaine'. Captain Boonstra was probably akin to the commander of the ship the long-suffering William Lithgow boarded in Venice, whose 'Master had no compasse to direct his course, neither was he expert in Navigation', hoisting up the sails at night, and travelling only by day, in sight of land.
The Tiger seems to have been caught in a tempest sweeping the Ionian Sea, and blown towards Malta. There is no extant record of their shipwreck, but we can hear the storm throughout Kit's work in the 'hurly-burly in the heavens', the 'deaf'ning dreadful thunders' and 'nimble sulphurous flashes', as ships toss and pitch 'till the brine and cloudy billow kiss the moon', as panicked mariners see the 'ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam,/To be exalted with the threatening clouds' and cannot say 'it is a sea, for it is now the sky: betwixt the firmament and it you cannot thrust a bodkin's point . . . how it chafes, how it rages, how it takes up the shore!' (Dido IV i 10; Pericles III i 1-6, III i 45; Julius Caesar I hi 6; The Winter's Tale III hi 83). The storm that engulfed Lithgow 'split our Mast, carrying sayles and all over-board', as sailors fought about who should first leap out, every man with the 'stamp of death in his pale visage'. As tempests rage in Kit's plays, mariners show an expert sense of how to respond to the difficulties they are in, go through the right series of manoeuvres, and use correct professional language. As the weather worsens, they scream to each other: 'Down with the topmast! Yare, lower, lower!' and 'All lost, to prayers, to prayers, to prayers! all lost!', until 'We spilt, we split, we split!' (The Tempest I i). We can sense the terror as the ship breaks up, or drifts helplessly to a rocky coast: 'O, the most piteous cry of the poor souls! Sometimes to see 'em, and not to see 'em; now the ship boring the moon with her main-mast, and anon swallowed with yeast and froth, as you'd thrust a cork into a hogshead' (The Winter's Tale III hi 88ff). We can almost feel the waves that wind about Leander as he swims through a storm to his Hero, and pull him under.
It is not known how Kit and Oliver survived the wreck. Perhaps, like Sebastian in Twelfth Night and 
geon in The Comedy of Errors, they bound themselves to a mast and were washed ashore; maybe, like William Lithgow, they ended up in a cave for three days,
without food and water, or were cast up on rocks like Pericles, and helped by fishermen. Kit would develop an aversion to
travelling by sea, would feature sea-storms and shipwrecks in twelve of his plays, and has a ship named the Tiger in two of them. In Macbeth the ship and its captain come in for special malice from the First Witch.
Nor is it known how they made their way back to England. The next that is heard of Kit is in September 1589, when he is arrested for his part in an affray in Hog Lane, near his lodgings in Norton Folgate - back in a London where the older generation of the establishment appeared creakily to be taking a final bow. The Queen's long-time favourite, Robert Dudley, was dead, and his stepson the glamorous Earl of Essex, a wooer of the people, was stepping into his place. Sir Francis Walsingham was ailing, though Kit's friend and tradecraft mentor Thomas Walsingham (who had just inherited family estates at Scadbury), seemed more inclined to life as a gentleman than to assuming his elderly relative's role as spymaster. It was Robert Cecil, the calculating, ambitious son of Lord Burghley, the Lord Treasurer, who had his eye on Walsingham's job; and wily old Burghley, who was also ill and already bereft of his beloved wife, had a mind to help him.
* Rosine, Oliver Laurens, pp. 42-50.
* Laurens box, folder 12 (journal).
* Boyd, Two's Company, p. 34.
† Laurens box, folder 12.