Oliver had waited at the river for Kit to leave Widow Bull's house from mid-morning through to late afternoon, in trepidation that churned more violently as each hour passed. By the time the figure in stinking rags walked down the lane that bent behind Great Dock to the shore, Oliver's tension had whipped up into panic. He saw Sir Robert's men everywhere: the wherryman who seemed to linger too long without a passenger; the labourer who went nowhere with a bundle of hemp; the naval cadet who passed by too often. And then Kit came - distracted, distraught, eyes wet, muttering 'base, base . . .', making to turn back, then sitting very still, staring blankly at Oliver in the boat, whispering words Oliver could barely catch, about guilt, cold conscience, and 'invisible disgrace'. Furtive, tense, the pair had slunk away like two thievish dogs, downstream to Gravesend.*
Kit brooded, dull, sporadically jumping to his feet; simply to stand still as his thoughts seemed to stupefy him. It was up to Oliver (disturbed by Kit's insistence on taking the name Walter Hoochspier) to visit the passport forger, and to arrange passage to Vlissingen. But as he watched Kit's half-hearted attempts to put on his sombre Flemish garb - doublet unbuttoned, hose ungartered, face as pale as his shirt - he decided to travel with his friend, at least across the Channel.
They were lucky to be able to leave quickly. Even a short Channel crossing could involve days of studying ships' bills to get a berth, and finding a boat by no means meant immediate departure, as the captain had to wait for sailing conditions to be favourable. But by a fortuitous combination of tide and good winds (together perhaps with a little string-pulling on Oliver's part), shortly after midnight of the day they arrived in Gravesend they were aboard the Expedition, bound for Vlissingen. There had been just enough time to fill the phobic Kit with sufficient sack at the Golden Bull either to overcome his fear of sea travel, or to blur his perceptions of where he was being taken to pass out.
They were below deck, which though abetting secrecy, was far from easy on the stomach. It was airless, stinking, and they were constantly stepped on by sailors. Kit was barely conscious, and Oliver was cornered by 'one Chatwynne', apparently a hardened traveller, who went on at length about how he had once spent fourteen days at Calais before the ship could leave; how, on another occasion, he had waited seven hours at Rye for the tide, and then the bark, after managing just a league or two, had been becalmed for half a day, and how they had had to return to shore by rowing boat and then take post horses to Dover, where it was another two days before they found a berth - but then winds had blown them off course and carried them along the coast back to Rye.
Chatwynne was the first to vomit. He 'waxed wonderful sick with the cruel surges of the water and the unsavoury stench of the ship', despite his much-boasted remedy of eating quince marmalade and drinking sea water mixed with wine to 'dry cold humours and shut the Orifices of the belly'.* The three had just one bucket between them, and were seasick all the way to Vlissingen.
On the second night, the ship was almost capsized by a strong gust; and the following morning as the fog cleared and they approached Vlissingen, they were chased by Spanish pirates in small boats - a common enough occurrence, smartly ended by a great discharge of cannon fire. The Expedition, which was bound for the Delft haven near Rotterdam, anchored some distance off the coast while a boatman came out to collect the Vlissingen passengers, charging an exorbitant amount to convey them back to shore.
Vlissingen was dangerous. Kit might easily be recognised. But it was also tumultuously busy - when Thomas Coryate passed through a few years later he marvelled that he saw more ships in Vlissingen than in any other port of his travels, some two hundred at one time, exceeding traffic even in Venice. There would certainly be spies from all quarters waiting to note who disembarked from an English ship, but the melancholic Fleming and his English manservant seem to have slipped unnoticed through the dockside throngs and on to a tavern called Den Eenhooren. With Kit out of sight in an upstairs room, Oliver could move more freely. Once again, espionage contacts were useful. One Hans Wouters at the sign of Den Radijs could arrange secret passage behind enemy lines. ('Den Radijs' translates as 'The Radish', which had sexual connotations in both French and local Dutch dialect, so Wouters probably ran a bordello rather than a tavern.)
Kit had long experience in the Low Countries, and had picked up the language as a child. Through Flanders, Holland, Brabant and Limburg (and arguably much of Germany too) people spoke in a tongue that was almost generally comprehensible, but which was engulfed by a fog of different dialects - a haze of accents and wayward grammar that all travellers had to penetrate. Fynes Moryson notes that '[t]he language of the Netherlanders is a Dialect of the German toung, but sweetened with the levity of the French toung' (not an observation that would be well received today). He goes on to observe that Netherlanders 'delight more to speake the French toung' anyway, because of its 'sweetness and alacrity' in comparison with their own language. This melange vtas even more common in the south. Oddities of pronunciation or mistakes on Kit's part would simply have been taken as a curious regional variation. A year earlier, Sir Henry Wotton, one day to be English ambassador to Venice, had spent a month in Rome (where Englishmen were unwelcome) disguised as a dashing young German, 'drinking deep, in the German fashion, with mad German priests' and clinching his disguise by wearing 'a mighty blue feather in a black hat', which no Englishman would ever do. He managed not only to fool the priests, but also convinced one Baron Berloc of Cleves that he was almost a neighbour of his, from Cologne. By comparison, Kit's task was easy. Besides, he also had good French and Latin, and could 'add colours to the chameleon, Change shapes with Proteus'; he was a wizard when it came to disguise.
A week after the pair had arrived in Vlissingen, Oliver Laurens walked the four miles to the Dutch-held town of Middelburg alone. He needed to fabricate an excuse to explain his sudden absence from London. Middelburg was known as a source of many of the 'books of sedition' that were smuggled across the Channel, and Oliver had made this journey before, when he was sent by Robert Poley to crack a book-smuggling ring, using the cover of a stationer and book-buyer. His slothful employer, the 'Puddinge of St Paul's', was resigned to such forays, and would be placated with a batch of new titles on which he could make a fat profit.
'Walter Hoogh' had quit Vlissingen a few nights previously, past a bribed watch, along the river bank then with muffled oars across the Scheldt. After that he had to negotiate inland waterways and a treacherous, roundabout route to Antwerp on his own.
Antwerp was in a forlorn condition. In the first part of the sixteenth century it had been one of the busiest and richest trading cities in the world. It was where the pepper and cloves of the Portuguese spice trade were exchanged for copper and silver from the north; where fine English cloth was dressed and finished; where rough diamonds were turned into glittering gems; where Baltic grain, French wine, Italian silks, sugar from the Canaries, cheese from Gouda, beer from Haarlem converged, to be shipped out again to other parts of Europe, or to Africa, Asia and America. It was where the economies of Europe, for the first time in history, linked with a world market. A Venetian envoy once said that Antwerp was 'Venice outdone', and at its peak it did more trade in a fortnight than Venice did in a year. The money-men were quick to spot opportunities, speculating in pepper futures or foreign exchange rates, dealing in credit, making loans. Merchants became bankers, and grew immensely rich. In the wake of wealth came tapestry workshops, makers of musical instruments and publishers of lavish books, and magnificent architecture.
But it was not to last. Occupation by the Spanish and the revolt of the Dutch led to the disruption of trade and economic collapse. Long years of war left Antwerp a gaunt town of ghosts and dim promise. When, after a lengthy siege, the city had again fallen to the Spanish in 1585, the Dutch responded by closing the River Scheldt, its main artery to the oceans. As sea trade dwindled to a trickle, so industry imploded. Merchants took their merchandise elsewhere, the money men no longer met at the Bourse, shopkeepers struggled to stock their shelves. Thousands moved north - the Jews who had been the heart of the diamond-cutting industry fled to Amsterdam; Protestants who refused to convert to Catholicism took advantage of a dispensation granted by Philip II of Spain to sell their property and depart. In four years the population dropped from 80,000 to just over half that number. Some critics see the gloomy opening to The Merchant of Venice, where a melancholic trader Antonio bewails his 'want-wit sadness', as a reflection of the mood in Antwerp.* There was a parallel to draw: Venice was also by now in an economic decline.
The countryside became a wilderness. Spanish soldiers robbed and ravaged. Whole villages were abandoned, fields were left fallow, grass grew over the roads, dykes crumbled and houses collapsed. Wolves moved in. One hundred men were devoured by the creatures within a two-mile radius of Ghent in one year; a quarter of an hour's walk from Antwerp, the woods were so wolf-infested that you had to go armed against them; the historian Hooft cites an eyewitness account of a woman who had her breasts devoured by rogue dogs.
Kit's progress was sporadic; his journey terrifying. And his destination held no attraction for him - the farther he went, the farther behind him lay familiarity and friendship. Exhausted one night, at an isolated inn (which he had apparently reached on the back of an old, slow horse) Kit wrote, probably to Southampton:
How heavy do I journey on the way,
When what I seek - my weary travel's end -
Doth teach that ease and that repose to say
'Thus far the miles are measur'd from thy friend!'
The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know
His rider lov'd not speed being made from thee.
(Sonnet 50)
He ends his poem with the mournful realisation that 'My grief lies onward, and my joy behind.' When Kit had been on the Continent as a spy there had been moments when he had felt utterly set asunder, knowing that if he were caught his controllers would deny his existence. But there was always the sense of a covert network of support, the possibility of refuge. Nothing measured up to this extremity of loneliness in exile. He was a single dot in a land of strangers. And if he saw a face he recognised, he would have to hide.
Still shaken by the sudden nature of his flight, morbidly guilty that a man had been killed in exchange for his life, Kit started to blame Tom Walsingham for his predicament, complaining in a verse letter: 'Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day/ And make me travel forth without my cloak,/ To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way,/Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke' (Sonnet 34). The courage of Walsingham's action is clouded over by Kit's loneliness and guilt, and while Walsingham may shrug it off, Kit is stuck with the consequences: 'Though thou repent, yet I still have the loss'. He feels morally stained, and however Walsingham and Oliver may try to explain away what has happened ('To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face'), this is a salve 'That heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace.'
He entered Antwerp towards the end of June (continental reckoning of dates being ten days later than in England), taking a ferry across the near-deserted Scheldt to one of the hoofden piers that gave access to gates in the riverside city wall. His passport (this one bought from a forger in Vlissingen) was penned in the hand of the Count of Brabant, and would appear not to have been questioned. Knowing he should avoid De Roy Lelie inn, which had belonged to the English Nation (a merchant's fellowship) and might still harbour the odd spy, he followed directions Oliver had given him to Het Gulden Cruys, a tavern among the bordellos and bathhouses of Stoofstraat (the 'Street of Stews'), just a few minutes from the Sandersgat, where he had alighted. The big, wooden communal tub of steaming water at the 'stew' next door, the table alongside laid with bread and Hoegaerden beer, and perhaps the attentions of a resident 'vrouwken van occasie' ('woman of opportunity'), were welcome respite to a weary and traumatised traveller.
There were places in the city that Kit knew he had to avoid. Zwartzustersstraat on the other side of town, where the city postmaster Adrian de Langhe, a notable passport forger, had his home, was a meeting point for banished English priests who were about to slip back across the Channel; and Den Gulden Hoorn tavern was also a rendezvous for English recusants and a mailing depot - one Jacques Ghibbes (or Gibels) had for years been running letters to England, and smuggling human cargo for forty shillings a head. At either of these places Kit could have run into one of Cecil's secret 'watchers'. Cecil had two resident agents in Antwerp, a Welshman who lived in De Langhe's house and a man variously known as Sterrell, Robert Robinson and H. Saint Main - though neither of these men knew Kit. Tom Walsingham had suggested Antwerp as a haven precisely because it was behind enemy lines and was therefore relatively free of Englishmen. And Oliver, of course, knew clandestine means of reaching the city to keep communication running.
Oliver's earlier contacts seem to have been useful to Kit. Within a few weeks of arriving he was lodging in chambers (near Stoofstraat) owned by Diego Lopez Alleman, a Marrano merchant who had fallen on hard times. By mid-July a 'Wter. de Hooch' is mentioned in the accounts of the printer and bookseller Pieter Bellerus, where some years earlier an 'o lourens' was paid as a temporary proof-reader.*
The steam and smoke from the chimneys of the stews in Stoofstraat acted as a beacon to Kit, as he walked back home each day after work at the Bellerus printing shop. He may also have dropped in on the bookshop of Bellerus's rival, the renowned publisher Christophe Plantin, who operated from a large establishment on the Vrijdagmarkt at the sign of the 'Gulden Passer' ('Golden Compasses', the name by which Plan-tin's firm had long been known, after its colophon). Antwerp was a safe distance from the battlefront, and intellectual activity was still vigorous (though perhaps of a more Catholic bent than before), centred on the surviving book trade. The streets were deserted, but the city held on to its beauty, like a grandly dressed widow waiting quietly for something to happen (or, as one visitor put it, 'a superannuated Virgin that hath lost her Lover').
Writing in 1616, a traveller called Dudley Carleton noted: 'Antwerp I own surpasses all the towns I have seen in the magnificence of its buildings, the breadth of its streets, the strength and beauty of its fortifications', but goes on to say that grass grew between the paving stones, that Jesuits were giving lessons in the former English Factory, and that '[f]or all the time I was there, I never could count in the whole length of any street more than forty persons at once. I saw neither carriages nor horsemen, and though it was a week-day, not one of us saw a pennyworth sold in the shops'. By the time Kit arrived, the Dominicans and Jesuits were already working to restore fine churches smashed by Protestants, and the Spanish had renovated the star-shaped citadel, which now housed a crack Castilian regiment - tall, dark men whom the locals thought 'proud and magnificull', and who sported enviable neckware. 'Their hose and their ruffs are nothing less than comely!' was one admiring opinion - quite an admission in a city that was renowned for the lily-whiteness of its linen, and which had given England the ruff.
Isolated from any contact with players, Kit turned again to writing narrative poetry. The antics in the bordello next door appear to have set the tone. To this period belongs The Rape of Lucrece, a poem of Ovidian sensuality (like the Amores Kit had translated years before, which would be banned as 'unseemly' in England in 1599), in which the rapist Tarquin is caught between 'frozen conscience and hot-burning will' - a similar dilemma, perhaps, to the one that faced Kit in Deptford, where his will to survive and ambition to create had to be balanced against another man's life. He would explore similar territory in Macbeth. Like Tamburlaine and Titus Andronicus, the poem is preoccupied with bloodshed, and a description of the Battle of Troy matches the detail of Guilio Romano's fresco in Mantua with extraordinary fervour - but this was more likely the result of a vivid impression made during an earlier visit than proof that Kit somehow made a trip to Italy at this point. He dedicated Lucrece to Southampton with the words 'The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end', wishing him 'long life still lengthned with all hapinesse', a poignant acknowledgement perhaps that they would never see each other again.
Kit appears not to have waited for a visit from Oliver, but to have taken the risk of sending Lucrece with the ordinary post. The spy 'Sterrell' who bribed one of De Langhe's letter clerks with twenty-eight ducats a month, was able briefly to delay and scan all mail weighed in Antwerp. On 26 August 1593 he records 'averse of Lucr. & Tarquin' that is 'too long for suspicion of cipher'. Curiously, he also notes a 'tragedie Ric terf, which may indicate that Kit was making changes to the Richard III he had been working on in England. (One wonders whether Sir Robert Cecil would have been riled by the portrayal of a hunchbacked, Machiavellian power-seeker who would stop at nothing, in the same way that Queen Elizabeth, on seeing Richard II, is alleged to have exclaimed angrily: I am Richard II, know ye not that?)
Kit was certainly by this time writing Love's Labour's Lost, a comedy which has no literary source but which was possibly based on a visit he made to Navarre in the early 1580s. In unfamiliar surrounds Kit drew on his past for inspiration and on people he had known in England for his characters - Thomas Nashe can be seen in Moth, a cheeky child who lays verbal traps and makes pert phrases; his rival Gabriel Harvey in the linguistic fop Armado, and a compliment to Lord Strange in naming the king Ferdinand. He wickedly satirised Sir Walter Ralegh and his intellectual circle (this play is the source of the phrase 'the School of Night'), lending fuel to the argument that before leaving England Kit had fallen out with Ralegh and associated more with the rival grouping around Essex and Southampton - yet another reason for incurring Cecil's loathing. There is further evidence of a souring in his relationship with Sir Walter. Kit's ballad 'Come live with me and be my love', which was wildly popular at the time (even more so when it was given a new tune by William Corkine, eponymous son of the man whose buttons Kit had sliced off in Canterbury), became the subject of Ralegh's tart satire. Some critics even detect the sulky petulance of a cuckolded lover in Ralegh's reply:
If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move,
To live with thee and be thy love . . .
Love's Labour's Lost represents the first time that Kit had attempted writing drama in the absence of a group of players. But soon after he had begun, fortune delivered him a theatre troupe - or rather transported him to the foot of their stage. His employer Pieter Bellerus sent him to Frankfurt, as the firm's representative at the September book fair. Performing there, as it often did, was the travelling company of Robert Browne.
Kit travelled with two of Bellerus's colleagues, the booksellers Jan van Keerbergen and Martin Nutius. It is through Van Keerbergen's account of the journey that we can follow the progress of 'Walter de Hoogh'.*
The Frankfurt book fair was crucial to trade, especially in such tumultuous times, when reaching customers was difficult. Despite the war the fair remained important for meeting German and Parisian clients, and had become Christendom's foremost book mart. Bellerus was probably reluctant to undertake the dangerous journey himself. Not only wolves, but brigands and deserters terrorised small parties of travellers, and the safest option was to move in large convoys under military escort. Or to send an assistant. Kit and his colleagues joined a group of merchants who, accompanied by Spanish soldiers, journeyed first to Brussels to wait for more to join the train, then on through Liege and up to Cologne - a few travellers on horseback, and twenty covered wagons juddering on large spoked wheels along awful roads, pursued by dogs, splattered by mud and from time to time drenched by rain, the precious cargo of books taking priority over bodies and clothes in the struggle to keep things dry.
At Cologne they rested a few days, ostensibly to do business but primarily for 'een schale goeden Rijnsch wijn' ('a bowl of good Rhenish wine') with local bookseller friends, in a tavern near the river. Cologne was the main German metropolis of the time, and nearly as important as Antwerp as a centre of publishing. According to Thomas Coryate, it had a 'very delectable' situation 'in a pleasant and fruitful plaine' hard by the Rhine, and was so vast that 'a man can hardly goe round about it under the space of foure houres'. The size, energy and prosperity of the city must have set Kit longing for life in London - though the cathedral could hardly compare with St Paul's, having just one rather dumpy unfinished tower.
After 'dri daghe verblivinge ('three daies aboad') they took a boat up the Rhine to Frankfurt. Booksellers, publishers and their agents, printers and scholars descended on Frankfurt for what one visitor, Henri Estienne (known as 'Stephanus'), called an 'Academy-Fair', likening it to classical Athens. It was a meeting place for scholars, a chance for famed academics to exchange views, air new ideas, find publishers and buy books. 'For here all may enjoy the living voice of many honoured persons, who gather here from many different academies,' wrote Estienne. 'Here very often right in the shops of the book-sellers you can hear them discussing philosophy no less seriously than once the Socrateses and the Platos discussed it in the Lyceum.' It was a cosmopolitan crossing point for what Dr Dee once called the 'intertraffique of the mind'. The visiting booksellers put up their stalls in the Buchgasse, hanging boards in front that announced the names of their publishing houses, and plastering posters about heralding new publications. They came from all over Europe, as varied in dress and appearance as in the languages they spoke. In the streets, as a fringe to this more respectable trade, were women and children selling songs and calendars, and beyond that, the general fair with arms merchants and jugglers, English comedians, elephants and ostriches, dentists, quacks and (in the year that Kit was there) a troupe of Russian maskers 'gecleet in wonderlijck garnement ende bonte mutse' ('in fantastical garb and hats of fur'). It was frantically busy. A young visitor called Josias Maler, who (like Kit) spoke French and Latin and so was much in demand, worked during one fair for his stepbrother Christoph Froschauer and 'had an evil time in carrying books back and forth and could not escape any time to see the city' (though he did eventually manage a jug or two of 'a good class of beer' on a boat on the Main).
Frankfurt was surrounded by fertile land that 'cheere[d] the tables of the Fair with many sorts of wine, especially the Rhenish'. Eating, drinking, socialising and entertainment were a crucial part of the fair's activities. The tavern where the Antwerp party stayed, the Nuernberger Hof, never had fewer than 125 extra 'strangers' eating there on fair days and Robert Browne's English comedians performed two or three plays a day.
Kit, of course, had to avoid any direct contact with Browne's men, many of whom had worked with him before, but he did approach them circuitously. Van Keerbergen records that: 'here de Hoogh mochte geerne spelen schriven, ende oock in die Engelendische tale, maer hi es seer verlegen ende swigelijc daerover. Hi hevet sine spelen met ene bootschapper aen het Engelendische Comoedianten gestuurt ende si hebben slechts twee talers daervoor betaelt, ende nochtans woude hi niet hen spreecken ('de Hoogh would fain write plaies, and in English, but is very shy with it and keeps close, and has sent it with a messenger to the English Comedians and was paid but two thalers yet would not speake with them withal'). He mentions Kit at the back of the crowd that pressed around the players' platform, fingertips on lips, brow slightly knit - perhaps watching his own Jew of Malta or Tamburlaine, then one day seeing what they could do with Love's Labour's Lost before a non-English-speaking audience. This performance pedigree probably explains why the play uses every conceivable farce convention in the book, from mistaken identity and straying letters, to drunk scenes and impersonation - as well as an appearance by elaborately dressed Russian maskers. Kit saw the work acted and knew what changes he had to make. The play was taken to England some weeks later by Oliver (who was in Frankfurt on behalf of the Puddinge). It was printed in 1598 'as it was presented before her Highness this last Christmas, Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespeare - the first time Will's name appeared on a title page (even if not yet as an author). Will himself had a go at an imitative sequel, Love's Labour's Won, a dismal piece that flopped immediately and was soon lost, though it is mentioned by the playgoer Francis Meres in his Wit's Treasury of 1598. Neither Oliver nor Tom Walsingham paid much attention to the appear ance of a Love's Labour's Won. Had they known what it augured, they might very well have cut all contact with Will Shakespere 'incontinently'.
Kit had had no time to make a copy of Love's Labour's Lost but he knew the drinking habits of Browne's men, and more importantly, the secret of the complicated lock on the old coffer in which Robert Browne stored the players' parts and a few heavy prompt-books. He also knew that given the inflated inn prices at fair time, the men would be sleeping in their wagon, and that it would be empty in the hour following their afternoon performance.
Browne had been agreeably surprised to have been offered a play of such quality, albeit anonymously. He was quite astounded to find the manuscript missing the morning after the first performance, and the paltry two thalers he had paid for it left inside his safe box. The astonishment turned to anger when he discovered that also missing was his long-held manuscript of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark- the play Marlin had written for Essex's men in Elsinore (that elusive work that the modern world refers to as the Un-Hamlet).
By mid-autumn, Kit was back in Antwerp, his own meagre library now extended by a clutch of books he had picked up at Frankfurt - volumes not so easy to come by in Antwerp, and (given the price of books, and his unstable finances) probably traded in lieu of wages. He had indulged his taste for things Italian with a used copy of Dante's Divina Commedia, novellas by Bandello, and a brand new history of Verona by Corte, which told the tale of the mindless feud between the Montecchi and Capelletti. This no doubt reminded Kit of the poem by Arthur Brooke, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Iuilet, which he had lightly drawn on in Venus and Adonis. Curiously the names of the Montecchi and Capelletti families are also to be found in the Purgatorio.
He returned to find his landlord Diego Lopez Alleman in some trouble, having been accused of practising Judaism. Marranos like the Allemans were Jews who had ostensibly converted to Christianity, though behind a veil of Catholicism many kept the old religion. We have here (if we are to follow Heas-man's reasoning that The Merchant of Venice is partially based on Kit's experiences in Antwerp) a possible clue to what Antonio is asking when he makes the odd demand of Shylock that as a condition of his pardon he 'presently become a Christian' (IV i 382), and why (given the ambiguity of Marrano religious practice) Shylock so readily agrees. Diego Alleman had let his Marrano facade slip. Antwerp under the Spanish had become less tolerant, and a spy had reported to the authorities that, though the weather was icy, no smoke was seen from the chimneys of the Alleman household on Friday nights or Saturdays. Although Jewish law forbade the lighting of fires on the Sabbath, many Marrano families employed trustworthy gentiles to light fires for them, and it is unclear why the Allemans had stopped doing this. Kit's rooms were near the Alleman house, and it would appear that soon after coming back from Frankfurt he took over this fire-lighting role, perhaps for a reduction in his rent but quite possibly simply as a kindness. Closer contact with the Alleman family gave him an unexpected insight into events in England.
Jews had been expelled from England by King Edward I in 1290, and were not legally to return until 1652, under Cromwell. A very few had remained, preferring conversion to banishment and taking shelter in a Domus conversorum, a House of Converts initially run by Dominicans in what is now Chancery Lane. There were also tiny settlements of Marranos, escapees from the Inquisition, in London and Bristol. One of these refugees was Roderigo Lopez, who had fled Portugal in 1579 and set up in London as a doctor. By 1586 his reputation was so strong that he had been appointed chief physician to Queen Elizabeth. Lopez frequently sent money to poor Marranos in Antwerp, and was in correspondence with Diego Lopez Alleman. In January 1594 he was accused by the Earl of Essex of conspiring to poison the Queen. Evidence for this was scanty, and it seems most likely that Lopez was set up by the earl, a victim of personal politicking. Confessions were wrested from servants under torture, and some enigmatically worded letters from the Spanish Netherlands were intercepted and held up as proof of Lopez's involvement in anti-English activities. An unsigned letter from Antwerp (which turned out to be from Diego Lopez Alleman) was one of these, and was used in Lopez's conviction in February. Elizabeth remained unconvinced and put a hold on the matter for three months, but on 7 June 1594 Lopez was castrated, hanged, cut down while still alive, disembowelled, and quartered at Tyburn.
The Alleman family were considerably shaken, and felt some responsibility for Lopez's death - even though Diego's letter had nothing to do with a conspiracy, and most probably referred to arrangements Lopez was making to leave London for Antwerp, en route to Italy or Constantinople, where Jews were tolerated. As news filtered back from London, to be discussed at the Alleman's Sabbath family gatherings, Kit picked up fragments of talk about the welling of anti-Jewish sentiment in London, and the consequent enormous popularity of a play called The Jew of Malta, which was performed no fewer than fifteen times during the Lopez trial and in the months before his execution.
That news must have been disturbing to Kit. Although the wicked Barabas in The Jew of Malta has all the trappings of a stock stage Jew, the Christians in his milieu are hardly models of virtue either, and their treatment of Barabas in part accounts for his crimes. To hear that his play (with who knows what coarse amendments incorporated by the players) was thus abused, angered Kit. He had known Jews in Padua, where there was a large and erudite community, and had become close to the Allemans and other Marranos in Antwerp. While his views were possibly still clouded by standard Elizabethan prejudice, he had a keener, more sophisticated perception of Jews than many of his contemporaries. It was as a counterblast to the surge of unpleasant interest in The Jew of Malta that he set about writing The Merchant of Venice, with its now famous plea:
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
(Ill i 5iff)
Critics have noted strong similarities between the plays, but Kit was careful this time around to open a gateway of sympathy for his main character - though of course we have no way of knowing how much was altered or added by the company in performance, and now comes down to us set in stone. Kit's main source for the story was Ser Giovanni's collection of prose romances Il Pecorone, a rather ill-considered move if he was to pass the work off as Will Shakespere's, as Il Pecorone was at the time available only in Italian, and anybody detecting the source might know that Will could not read or speak that language.
One of the changes the players instituted was, no doubt, the transformation of Shylock's costume from one including a yellow beret or turban (which all Jews in Venice, with the exception of some bankers, were required to wear) to one involving a 'Jewish gaberdine' {The Merchant of Venice I iii 107; a gaberdine was a full, loose-fitting cloak). There is no historical justification for this, not among Italian Jews nor London or Flanders Marranos, and no-one has satisfactorily explained what it means. Some commentators point out that Thomas Coryate noted on his travels that all Venetian Jews wore 'a kinde of light yellowish vaile, made of Linsie Woolsie (as I take it) over [their] shoulders, something worse than our courser Holland, which reacheth a little beneath the middle of their backes'. But perhaps the explanation is simply that the Lord Chamberlain's Men, who performed it first, had a gaberdine cloak but no yellow beret in their costume box. Or that 'gaberdine' scans better than 'vaile' or 'flatte hatte' in the context. This is, after all, a play, and there is a danger in being too literal-minded about its historical references.
Although Kit chose to set his new play in Venice - an alluringly exotic location to an Elizabethan audience, a city of unfettered passions and immense riches - he drew on his experiences among Jews in Padua, Antwerp, and possibly Mantua, in creating Shylock. He had, of course, visited Venice during the time he and Oliver had spent in Padua, and he incorporated his recollections and impressions in the play: the bustle on the Rialto, the ferry between the two cities, moonrise over Villa Barbaro (which he transforms into Belmont). Perhaps, like Thomas Coryate did in 1608, he visited the Ghetto and argued religion with a rabbi:
For when as walking in the Court of the Ghetto, I casually met with a certaine learned Jewish Rabbin that spake good Latin, I insinuated my selfe after some few termes of complement into conference with him, and asked him his opinion of Christ, and why he did not receive him for his Messias . . . after there had passed many vehement speeches to and fro betwixt us, it happened that some forty or fifty Jewes more flocked about me, and some of them beganne very insolently to swagger with me, because I durst reprehend their religion: Whereupon fearing least they would have offered me some violence, I with drew my selfe by little and little towards the bridge at the entrance into the Ghetto, with an intent to flie from the [re], but by good fortune our noble Ambassador Sir Henry Wotton passing under the bridge in his Gondola at that very time, espyed me somewhat earnestly bickering with them, and so incontinently sent unto me out of his boate one of his principall Gentlemen . . . who conveighed mee safely from these unchristian miscreants, which perhaps would have given mee just occasion to forsweare any more coming to the Ghetto.
We can perhaps take the gathering of the crowd of 'forty or fifty' with a pinch of salt. These Jews, and those he had encountered a few days earlier in Padua, were the first Coryate had ever seen, and he was inclined to marvel, and to exaggerate - for instance he puts the number of Jews in Venice at the time at five or six thousand, when more conservative estimates hold the figure to be nearer one or two thousand.
Curiously Kit does not mention the Ghetto. The Ghetto in Venice, set up in 1516, was the first of its kind, and derives its name from the old public foundry (geto in Venetian dialect) formerly sited on the island. Jews in Padua and Mantua were not at this time subject to such strict confinement, and Marranos in Antwerp were free to live anywhere in the city. Kit's dramatic world is an amalgam of Venice and of Jewish communities in Padua and Mantua, with something of the gloomy air of contemporary Antwerp. He anchored many of his plays in real places yet bent facts to suit his dramatic purposes, such as, notoriously, giving Bohemia a coastline in The Winter's Tale.*
Though seemingly settled in Antwerp, Kit was stirred by a deep restlessness. He still believed he might one day return to England, so all about him felt inescapably temporary. Nothing held a history, all friends were new friends, the ground was thin beneath his feet. So, like the wind, he was drawn to wander. He is not always easy to track down - but he does not completely disappear. It is possible to spot him from time to time, flitting through cities as an itinerant actor, perched on a printing house stool arguing with scholars, or as a stranger shining for a moment among a court's intelligentsia.
A poet may change his name, but not his plumage.
* The image is Oliver's: Laurens box, folder 12 (journal, folio 122).
* Quoted in Rosine, Oliver Laurens, p. 213.
* Carol Heasman, Hate and Redemption in A Winter's Tale, and Other Essays, p. 432.
* Copies of the accounts are held in Bernhardt Institute, Laurens box, folder 14.
* See the recently published Het Reisjournaal van Jan van Keerbergen, edited by Eduard Dekker.
* This is what Lord Yentob calls the Ambridge Effect, after the village in a long-running BBC radio soap opera. Ambridge is said to be near Birmingham, yet has residents with a curious range of romantic rustic dialects, and neighbouring towns with entirely made-up names, (cont...)
Characters travel via fictional 'Borchester' on to real-life events in London; people from the outside world make appearances in Ambridge in their own persona. The audience is quite happy to let Ambridge in their own persona. The audience is quite happy to let fantasy and reality mingle (see K Yentob, Borchester Chronicles, p. 6). Technically, though, it may be argued that Bohemia did have a coastline in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as it was incorporated in Hapsburg territory, and so the King of Bohemia (who also happened to be the Holy Roman Emperor) held (who also happened to be the Holy sovereignty all the way to the coast.