The band that left Antwerp in May travelled first to Cologne, then up the Rhine. At Strasbourg, Rubens inexplicably branched off to Paris, a loss which did not leave Kit particularly crestfallen. The young painter had displayed a monstrous arrogance, and had proved to be a taxing travelling companion. Although he was but a bright-eyed unknown, initially employed merely as a copyist, he boasted that he had himself 'chosen my Lord the Duke as patron'. He was full of the superior wonders of Italy (a country he had not yet visited), disdained his fellow Flemings, and kept correcting Kit's Italian. Kit had, anyway, always been friendlier with the Brueghels. Perhaps, also, Rubens's pride and ambition was a little too close a reminder of the callow Kit Marlin who had roistered through Cambridge two decades earlier. Rubens's posturing was made even more irksome by a smug urbanity, a facile social grace that he had honed while a pageboy to the Countess de Lalaing. The rest of the party pushed on to the Alps without him. He finally deigned to appear in Mantua nearly a year later.
In a letter back to Antwerp, one of the travellers records his delight and astonishment at his first view of Italy, which seemed to happen in an instant, as they rounded a corner at the top of a pass. The light seemed sharper, the sky higher. Before them lay 'the paradise to gain which we have suffered the purgatory of these uncouth mountains, fair Italy, the fount of learning'.* Sunlight soaked the plains of Lombardy. The way ahead looked daunting, dramatic and alluring. They rode down through the foothills, some to Venice, others towards Mantua.
The ducal city of Mantua was an island, flanked by four glittering lakes that reflected its towers and spires and the pinkish yellow of its sandstone and brick. Bending reeds and perfumed lily-beds crowded the marshes on the lakes' far edges, beyond which lay 'whole Forests of Olive-trees, whole woods of Lemmons, and Oranges, whole fields of Rice, Turky wheat and Muskmillions'. The seasoned traveller Thomas Coryate was enraptured by the 'abundance of goodly meadows, pastures, orchards and gardens' around the lakes, which supplied Mantua's markets with a profusion of 'delectable fruites' and 'odoriferous flowers'. He enthused that 'this most sweet Paradise . . . did even so ravish my senses, and tickle my spirits with such inward delight that I said unto my selfe, this is the Citie which of all other places in the world, I would wish to make my habitation in, and spend the remainder of my dayes . . .' (were it not, of course, for the unfortunate presence of grossly idolatrous Catholics).
Mantua was reached through what Kit had once called 'fruitful Lombardy,/The pleasant garden of great Italy' (The Taming of the Shrew I i 3-4), or by sailboat along waterways that led as far as Venice and Milan. In a sense, the entire duchy was an island - independent of the Spanish, not subservient to Venice, uncowed by the Pope, and protected by politic marriages against unfriendly inroads from its neighbours. Though strategically important, Mantua was not particularly powerful; and though prosperous, it stood economically in Venice's shadow. Duke Vincenzo smarted a little at his lack of military might and dwindling financial influence, and compensated by making Mantua pre-eminent in the arts.
Vincenzo's Gonzaga forebears had been tasteful and prodigious builders, and had amassed a magnificent collection of some of the leading painters of the Renaissance. In 1588 the Venetian ambassador Francesco Contarini had marvelled at Mantua's 'wealth of many beautiful and great palaces' and (with a Venetian's envy) at its spacious streets, which were 'long and wondrously straight'; and the sixteenth-century art historian Giorgio Vasari was full of praise for the city's adornments. Vincenzo added to the artworks, buying startling new paintings by the young Caravaggio, cornering the services of Pourbus, and spotting the talent of Peter Paul Rubens. A Raphael Madonna belonging to the Count of Canossa had so bewitched him that he handed over an entire estate - land, castle, title, rent, and all - in exchange. He collected intaglios and cameos, and commissioned jewellers, goldsmiths and silversmiths from across the world. His beneficence was not confined to the plastic arts. In 1586 he had rescued the poet Tasso from a madhouse in Ferrara, and offered him succour for the rest of his life. Claudio Monteverdi played in his private orchestra, and in 1601 became his maestro di cappella.
Most of all, Vincenzo loved the theatre. The court troupe was renowned throughout Italy, and its chief actor Tristano Martinelli was the greatest Arlecchino (Harlequin) of his day. So jealous was Vincenzo of his performers' talent, that he rarely gave permission for wandering companies to perform in Mantua. (This was lucky for Kit, as his former colleague Will Kempe had left the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and after morris dancing from London to Norwich, had embarked on a tour of Germany and Italy.) The duke adored old-fashioned spectacle and pastorals, yet he was adventurous in his tastes and enthusiastic about new forms, especially appreciating combinations of music and drama. Barely a day passed without a concert or theatrical performance of some kind.
Kit could hardly have chosen a more stimulating refuge. Padua was out of the question, as it contained too many people he knew, and by the turn of the century was swarming with Sir Robert Cecil's spies. Venice was similarly risky. Mantua was gratifyingly cosmopolitan, yet more popular among Flemings, Germans and the nations south of the Alps, than with the English - though the loss of the Scotsman, the Admirable Crichton, was still 'heavily bemoaned' two decades after his death.
It would appear that Kit was not directly connected with the court, but did move in its milieu. The most likely scenario is that he had taken up with the duke's musicians at Spa, and had some promise of future employment. At times he used the name Walter de Hooch, though this later became Gualtiero Stangone - an Italianisation of 'Walter Hoochspier' ('Stangone' means high pole). His Antwerp landlord, Diego Lopez Alleman, had provided him with a letter of introduction to a Mantuan Jewish family, who arranged lodgings for him near the ducal palace, on the edge of the San Pietro district - a quarter popular at the time with the Jewish community.
Mantuan Jews made up 7 percent of the city's population, and in contrast to those in Venice, were not forced to live in a ghetto. The Gonzagas had held out against three successive anti-Semitic papal bulls in the course of the sixteenth century, and Mantua became a haven for Jews fleeing from elsewhere in Europe. The contemporary annalist Joseph Hacohen says of Vincenzo that 'he favoured the Jews and spoke kindly to them', and the duke sent officials on horseback, armed with clubs, to protect Jews after a Franciscan monk named Bartholomew da Solutio had been rousing the rabble against them, demanding that Vincenzo institute a ghetto and the wearing of yellow badges. Vincenzo would finally give in to papal demands, but delayed the creation of a ghetto by drawing out negotiations with the Jewish community from 1602 to 1610. The Mantuan Jews were the last in Italy to be confined to a ghetto. Kit's experience of Mantuan Jewry would lead to his play Jehuda, a development of the Merchant of Venice. The play is mentioned by Oliver in 1608, but no record of a performance exists. It was either suppressed, lost, considered too eccentric for the time, or was a casualty of an incident in 1607 when Laurens was a victim of a highway robbery. Aspects of The Merchant of Venice the absence of a ghetto, the fact that Jews and gentiles can socialise together - indicate that it was based on knowledge of the state of affairs in Mantua rather than Venice, and hint at an earlier visit.
The Jewish community was very much part of daily city life, and made a strong contribution to music and theatre at court. By the time Kit arrived in Mantua, Leone de' Sommi, the Jewish court poet who was famed for his comedies and the lighting effects in his productions, had died, but his plays were still popular - and some say form the basis of modern Italian comedy. The Jewish composer Salomone Rossi, who was just a few years younger than Kit and had been a pupil of Palestrina, had long held a court appointment, and was an innovator in choral music and a prolific writer of madrigals. Kit was soon singing madrigals for Rossi, and through him re-established ties he had made at Spa with Claudio Monteverdi.
As gaunt as if he had stepped out of a painting by El Greco, with a thin, straying beard and a deeply melancholic air, Monteverdi was, oddly enough, almost the double of the great Arlecch-ino, Tristano Martinelli. They had been mistaken for each other on at least one occasion. He was still fresh with the ideas of the 'canto alia francese he had picked up in Flanders, and Kit further inspired him by singing songs by John Dowland. Indeed, one of the airs that Kit had worked on together with Dowland, In darkness let me dwell, is strangely similar to Monteverdi's Lament of Arianna (see Appendix V). A cautious working relationship grew into close friendship, and Kit sang frequently in court concerts. He appears in some measure to have slipped into the hollow left by the Admirable Crichton, not only singing but improvising verse, displaying phenomenal feats of memory, holding exuberant public disputes and writing short comedies in Italian for courtiers to play in.* Despite his obscure background, he moved into the duke's favoured circle, and could be found not only in the main Gonzaga court, but at Palazzo Te, Vincenzo's intimate pleasure-palace on its own island in the lake; and also some miles from Mantua at Sabbioneta, where Vespasi-ano Gonzaga, a minor scion of the family, had created a 'cittd ideate, an ideal city modelled on ancient Athens and Rome.
A legend of terror had grown around Vespasiano, who as a soldier had carried off the beautiful Diana de Cardona, but on later returning from the wars had been informed of her unfaithfulness and had murdered her gruesomely. Some critics see in this a parallel to Othello. In 1590, shortly before his death, Vespasiano had completed in Sabbioneta the Teatro Olimpico, an indoor theatre copied from Palladio's playhouse in Vicenza, and well ahead of its time in terms of stage design. Permanent pillars, arches and working windows receded in a contrived perspective on the playing area, and there were facilities for all manner of special effects, such as storms, magical disappearances and moving statues. At the other end of the auditorium, a loggia of Corinthian columns was crowned with sculptures of Olympian gods, which looked startlingly realistic by rushlight. The classical design of the theatre, indeed the air of ancient Athens and Rome that pervaded the whole of Sabbioneta, fed a fire in Kit's imagination that had been rekindled by Lipsius in Antwerp. His great Greek and Roman plays - Coriolanus, Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra, as well as Pericles and Timon of Athens, were to follow. During his frequent visits to the Teatro Olimpico, he became even more powerfully aware of the dramatic potential of darkness, which performing indoors allowed. His first real experience of this, in Kassel, had led to the ghost scenes in Hamlet. Now his theatrical use of night became more subtle and sophisticated - for Duncan's murder in Macbeth, in the opening scenes of Othello, and most supremely on the stormy heath in King Lear.
At the Palazzo Te, Duke Vincenzo held his more private entertainments. The palace, built by Vincenzo's grandfather as a hideaway for his mistress, had been designed and covered in extraordinary frescos by Giulio Romano, the man Kit was to call 'that rare Italian master' in The Winter's Tale, selecting him as an artist who could feasibly fashion a statue that was so realistic one could almost believe it lived:
. . . a piece many years in doing and now newly perform'd by that rare Italian master Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape. He so near to Hermione hath done Hermione that they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of answer . . .
{The Winter's TaleV ii 93-100)
In the play, the 'statue' of Hermione is, of course, Hermione herself. But the point of Romano's consummate artistry is made. Critics of the snickering sort are quick to point out Kit's 'mistake' in taking Romano (who is now known as a painter) for a maker of statues, but in Mantua, Romano was equally famed as architect, painter and creator of theatrical effects. His tombstone in the church of San Barbara referred to him as a master of three arts: painting, architecture and sculpture. Kit's favourite part of the Palazzo Te (he once managed to smuggle Oliver in for a look at it) was the extraordinary Sala dei Giganti, which depicted Jupiter's battle with the Giants. The room was round and domed, its floor covered with pebbles that made a crashing noise underfoot, which echoed in the cupola to give thunderous sound effect to the frescos. Real fires in the fireplaces appeared to burn the Giants; in the curved space perspective was completely distorted, so that the world seemed to be collapsing in on top of the spectator. The Giants themselves were terrifying. An impressed Giorgio Vasari wrote of it in 1541 that 'no one thought ever to see work of brush more horrible and frightening or more natural than this; and whoever enters in that room, seeing the windows, doors, and other such things twisted, and as if about to collapse, and the buildings falling, cannot but fear that everything will crash down upon him The Sala dei Giganti shows a skilled mingling of art and reality that would have made Giulio Romano the perfect choice as the supposed sculptor of a living statue of Hermione. (The room still exists. It is one of the unsung wonders of Italy.)
Art and life melded in the Palazzo Te; so did aesthetic appreciation and lechery. Duke Vincenzo loved not only the arts, but the artistes. And with some success. As a young man he had been alluringly handsome, with fine bones, features that seemed cut in alabaster, and strong auburn hair that offset his delicate complexion. He dressed with extreme elegance, in silks, jewels and rich brocades. Now nearly forty (he was just two years older than Kit) he had grown florid with luxurious living, but he maintained his attraction to women. Though fickle, he had the reputation of being tender. Musicians and performers were drawn to him not through sycophancy, but because he showed taste and practical understanding of their art. Hurt by the failure of his military campaigns against the Turks, he threw himself with fervour into a series of extravagant passions, usually with singers and actresses, and gave himself over to good living. One Mantuan chronicler, Ludovico Muratori, described him in 1612 as a 'great gambler, a spendthrift, much taken with luxury and women, for ever engaged in new love affairs, happy pastimes, fetes, balls, music and plays'. He was squandering his huge inheritance, and was forever losing himself in sincere but distracting amours, a man 'that loved not wisely, but too well' {Othello V ii 347), and perhaps a little too often. It was against this backdrop of music, generosity, longing, discovery and romance that Kit wrote his energetic, optimistic Twelfth Night, with perhaps more than a passing wink at Vincenzo in the infatuated Duke Orsino, with the famous opening lines: 'If music be the food of love, play on . . .'.
Kit was settled and content. A portrait from this period (of unknown origin, though not, as one might have hoped, by Rubens) shows a milder, more pensive man than the petulant rebel of the Corpus Christi painting. There is a touch of world-weariness about his eyes; the lips do not quite make it as far as a smile, but he has an air of guarded happiness. The fine, bouffant hair of his youth has thinned completely on top (he was already balding in London), but it is still long, and frizzes slightly over his ears. A gold earring in his left lobe adds a somewhat rakish dash.*
Yet Kit's new life in Italy was not all froth and spectacle. Duke Vincenzo was also at the centre of Mantuan academic circles. Although Tasso had died in 1595, Vincenzo kept up a serious literary tradition, and gave strong support to Mantua's academies. There are at least three records of a 'Gualtiero Stangone' contributing to scholarly debates.† The duke was also fascinated by discovery, and in the cellars of the ducal palace and in special apartments at the Palazzo Te, he housed a band of alchemists. In addition to their normal alchemical duties (including making gold and coming up with a potency powder for the forty-year-old duke), they were engaged in experimenting with forms of early chemical weapons. Vincenzo had instructed them to make cannonballs which would release clouds of poisonous gas that would kill the enemy Turk, or at least make him fall asleep or lose his memory. Kit, who had moved through Puritanism and Catholicism, who had been accused of atheism, and had mixed with magicians, was drawn to the alchemists. His thought in this period took an interesting turn towards paganism and sorcery, an extension of the interest he had shown years earlier in the shadowy circle of the Earl of Northumberland and Sir Walter Ralegh, and one that would be reflected in plays like King Lear, Cymbeline and Macbeth.
Another shadow from Kit's past was to sharpen into reality, in the late winter of 1600/1601, when he risked a visit to Venice.
Kit's ventures to Venice were rare - though his patchy knowledge of the city did not stop him from using it as a setting for his plays. To an English audience Venice was associated with riches, greed, beauty and debauchery. Kit had the theatrical sense to exploit this, but was, at times, prepared to use the Venetian backdrop loosely - the Doge, for instance, in Othello and The Merchant of Venice is wrongly ascribed with the power of a prince. Mantua could not be used with quite the same dramatic shorthand as Venice, and setting a play in his new hometown also ran the risk of giving the game away.
But there was one time of year when Kit could walk through the city without much danger of being recognised by spies or wandering Englishmen - during the masked revels of Carnevale. Masks were worn at other festivals, but never so generally as during the days of pre-Lenten excess. Although he was writing in 1688, the traveller Maximilian Misson gives some idea of the carnival licence Kit would have encountered:
. . . you shall see sometimes ten or twelve Rooms on a floor, with Gaming-tables in all of 'em, crowded with Gamesters mask'd, with Courtesans and Ladies of Quality, who under this disguise have the privilege of enjoying all the Diversions of the Carnival, provided they [the ladies of quality] can get a little out of the way of their Spies or jealous Husbands. They have also certain Rooms, where they sell Liquors, Sweetmeats and suchlike things.
Everyone thus mask'd, provided he be in good Apparel, has the liberty of talking to the Ladies even of the highest Quality, no body, not even the Husband himself, taking notice at that time what is said to his Wife, because the Mask is sacred, tho' this sometimes gives occasion to an Intrigue, in a place where scarcity of Opportunity prompts them to do more with the wink of an Eye, than in other countries with long Courtship.
Gondoliers knew secret byways to the 'Waiting-women' and 'for a good Reward will furnish ladders of Cords for an Intrigue'. At this time of the year St Mark's Square was filled with puppet-players, rope-dancers and fortune tellers, and hundreds of revellers. Social barriers crumbled and Priapus reigned. The renowned Venetian courtesans had a busy time of it. Thomas Coryate estimated there were twenty thousand of them, 'whereof many are esteemed so loose, that they are said to open their quivers to every arrow'. Others were 'fragrantly perfumed', decked in gowns of damask and stockings of carnation silk, adorned with jewels and costly stones, with 'chaines of gold and orient pearle like a second Cleopatra'. They lived in rich palaces, and in a cultured role similar to Japanese geisha, could sing, compose sonnets and discuss Boccaccio. Eat always did have a weakness for clever women.
'Gualtiero Stangone' was one of a group of men (which could very well have included the duke, incognito) who travelled to Venice for Carnevale in 1601.* They spent days and nights in dubious palazzi, gaming, singing and being sung to, eating sweet mincemeats and marzipan cakes and drinking muscat wine. It was on one of these nights that Kit noticed a woman standing apart. She was a little older than he, yet (in his words) hers was not the 'carcase of a beauty spent and done./Time had not scythed all that youth had begun,/ Nor youth all quit; but, spite of heaven's fell rage,/Some beauty peep'd through lattice of sear'd age.' {A Lover's Complaint 8-14). It was not until he heard her voice, and noticed her fingering a rosary of olive pips, that he realised who she was.
Venetians were renowned for their youthfulness and longevity, and though in her mid-fifties Bianca was still a striking beauty. Coryate remarked that many courtesans, having dedicated the flower of their youth to the devil, consecrated 'the dregs of their olde age to God by going into a Nunnery', while a rare few, those who had been most successful, lived out their old age in riches. Bianca was evidently of the latter sort. The woman who had relieved Kit of his virginity two decades earlier had been the djinni that incited his love for his 'Dark Lady', Emilia Bassano. Now Emilia returned to inhabit an older Bianca. She appeared wiser, wittier than Kit remembered her (though that was possibly because he understood more Italian), and the befuddled lust of his youth returned as a deep, clear passion. What followed is not entirely clear. An engraving exists, in one of the catalogues of courtesans and their pleasures that were common at the time, of '77 Signior Gualtiero Stangone' and 'Bianca Emiliana bella Cortesana di Venetid'† Both are masked. He wears characteristic Venetian black, a slender doublet and simple hose; she is in a rich damask gown with a high lace collar, her breasts bare, as was the custom. One of her hands is on his shoulder, the other beckons him closer. The presence of the engraving in the book is curious. Although portraits of courtesans were displayed around the city, and bawds kept miniatures for advertising purposes, the appearance of a picture of courtesan and client in a catalogue, especially as she is masked, is odd. The engraving is on a different paper from the rest of the catalogue, and was likely bound with it at a later date, which may mean that it was specifically aimed at a Mantuan market, or that there is a personal history involved.*
A fragmented account in Oliver Laurens's journal, written a year or so later, gives clues that the love was unrequited, or that the affair was corrupted by betrayal and ridden with jealousy. Two of Kit's poems date from this period - A Lover's Complaint, and the cryptic fragment now called The Phoenix and the Turtle, which proclaims 'Love and constancy is dead', and in which passion ends in ashes from which the phoenix does not rise. In A Lover's Complaint, it is the woman who is abandoned by an enchanting boy - a perplexing inversion, especially as the description of the seducer mingles a nostalgia for the young Henry Wriothesley into the poem. Kit had no doubt heard news of the Essex rebellion against Elizabeth in February, and rumours of Southampton's execution. In the end, Southampton's mother had intervened on his behalf, and he was reprieved and imprisoned in the Tower until after James I's accession, but the shock of hearing about the arrest seems to have re-awakened a fervour in Kit for a man whom he perhaps loved more in retrospect than he had in reality.
Kit would lay bare the corrosive powers of suspicion, mistrust and jealousy a few years later, in Othello, but before that he vented his bile in Troilus and Cressida, dipping deep into the pit of war and potato-fingered lechery, and bemoaning the fickleness of women. {Troilus and Cressida is also riddled with references to bone-ache and other symptoms then ascribed to venereal disease, which may indicate that an inflammation of old problems was adding to Kit's woes.) The play is cynical and misogynous, and as it moves back and forth between Troy and the Greek enemy encampment it so effectively recreates the stasis and boredom of two armies in a stand-off situation - the constant sense of waiting, punctuated with displays of pointless machismo - that it has the tang of first-hand experience. This could well have been the case.
From July to December 1601, Duke Vincenzo once again attempted to flaunt his military prowess in battle against the Turks, who were moving through Croatia towards Vienna. Like his earlier expeditions, this would bring him little glory. During his 1595 campaign, he had taken along a small cappella of four musicians, headed (probably because of his versatility) by the young Monteverdi. In 1601, however, Monteverdi stayed in Mantua, and so, it appears, did Kit. There is no indication that he accompanied Vincenzo, apart from the uncannily realistic battleground atmosphere of Troilus and Cressida. On the contrary, there is strong evidence that he remained in Mantua.
Duke Vincenzo handed the reins of state to his wife Leonora dei Medici. She gripped them firmly, and relished the ride. A glance at her papers of the time shows she had every bit of the Medici political wit, and savoured the powers of command. She brought with her the more subdued tastes of Florence. In contrast to Vicenzo's extravagant costume and the bejewelled ladies about her, she developed a studied simplicity in dress, offsetting her gowns with just one or two adornments, sometimes just a single string of pearls. She took violently against Vincenzo's alchemists, and even more so against her husband's profligate behaviour. Together with her eldest son Francesco - a watery, rather dull youth - she formed a moral faction against the duke. She was determined to curb any tendency to voluptuousness or excess in the upcoming generation. When Francesco had incurred his first debt to a moneylender, at the age of seven, she called for a whip and was stopped from publicly flaying him only by the sight of her other children kneeling in a row, in tears.
There is an echo of the situation that reigned in Mantua in late 1601 in Measure for Measure, where the Duke of Vienna (who in the play is called Vincentio), though not himself a libertine, thinks the city has grown morally lax and, under pretence of going on a pilgrimage, hands over to the puritanical Angelo. ALS with Othello, part of the plot of Measure for Measure comes from a story by the Ferrara-born writer Giraldi Cinthio, whose collection the Hecatommithi ('Hundred Tales') was favourite reading of the better sort of Venetian courtesan, and had apparently been passed on to Kit. His examination of the ethics of public office perhaps owes a debt to his long political discussions with Blotius in Vienna.
In Mantua, the political scene was further complicated by the appearance of Duke Vincenzo's sister, Margherita Gonzaga, who after the death of her husband, Alfonso d'Este II of Ferrara, had withdrawn into a nunnery, but returned shortly before Vincenzo's departure for battle, intent on wresting some power for herself. The venom that developed between the sisters-in-law widely infected an already dysfunctional family, creating an adders' nest of entangled hatreds worthy of King Lear.
Oliver Laurens did not manage to visit Kit in 1601. His use of espionage work as a cover for journeys to the Continent had backfired and he had been sent on a long mission north. On 2 October 1601, a 'Willm Halle' is mentioned by the Secretary of State's clerk as having returned with intelligence from Denmark. After this, Oliver either abandoned his usual alias, or stopped spy work, as there are no further references in the records to William Hall. He was not able to see Kit again until late summer of the next year, when Kit was dangerously ill with malaria. Stagnant pools after summer floods had brought the 'chilling, trembling sweat', as well as swamp fever, to Mantua.
The only works that had reached London since Kit left Antwerp were Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, The Phoenix and the Turtle, and A Lover's Complaint. It is not known how these were sent, though Kit possibly made indirect use of the frequent traffic between England and Padua, where Tom Walsingham still had contacts. Kit's first years in Mantua had been enjoyable but not overly productive, and Oliver was to return in 1602 almost empty-handed. He brought back Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well, another rather bitter comedy of unrequited love. The play is based on a story by Boccaccio (also a favourite author of the courtesans), though the difference in wealth between the two main characters is Kit's invention, and creates the opportunity for a long speech about the value of virtue over high breeding, an issue which still troubled Kit. Although he had penetrated the circle of the duke's favourites (as had Rubens, with even greater success), he was still very aware of the strictures of rank.
Will Shakespere's reaction to the slow supply of plays was characteristically opportunistic - he attempted to pass off one of his own pieces as of equal quality to the work he was getting from Kit. The True Chronicle History of Thomas Lord Cromwell, written by 'W. S.' was published by William Jones in 1602. It was not a success. Blackmail had ceased to be an effective ploy as (especially since Hamlet) the scales had tipped, and Shakespere had more to lose by exposing Tom Walsingham than he stood to gain by extortion. His own loss of face would be considerable, and besides, he no longer needed the money as shrewd early investments, particularly in the Globe, were making him a rich man. In May 1602 he paid the enormous sum of £320 for seven acres of farmland near Stratford, and entered into what would be a long business and personal relationship with William and John Combe, members of one of the most unpleasant, acquisitive and least-liked families in the town.
Whatever excuses Shakespere was inventing for his slow production, he found he had to continue making them long after Laurens's return from Italy with just two comedies. The play drought extended well into 1603, as Kit was unreachable for much of that year. Will Shakespere (in the eyes of the nation, now one of its leading poets) had to endure the embarrassment, if not the scandal, of coming up with no suitable eulogy when Queen Elizabeth died in March, nor any ode for the coronation of King James in the summer. In spite of his burgeoning fame, as the dry period of 1603 drew on, he stooped to collaborate with the relatively unknown Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle on a rewrite of a play that was already a decade old, Sir Thomas More.
* Quoted in Roy Delbont, Travellers' Tales, p. 212.
* Mentioned by Oliver Laurens in his journal, Laurens box, folder 12. Sadly, none of the comedies has survived, though it seems they were slight affairs. Kit retained his chief passion for writing in English.
* The portrait is in the private collection of Comtessa Luigina la Lollo, and bears a strong resemblance to the second image produced by the computer-ageing programme applied to the Corpus portrait (see Appendix II).
† Maria Servaes, Cum Grano Salis, p. 32.
* Roy Delbont, Travellers' Tales, p. 154.
† Julius Marx Collection.
* That the volume is unique, and is owned by the same collector as First suckes opens interesting ground for speculation.