Curtain Call
Within the too-solid city of London, in a shabby room in Southwark, close to the playhouses, Will Shakespeare sits and writes. Words flow from his pen, easy and clear.
Even as the sun with purple-colour’d face, he writes, Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheek’d Adonis hied him to the chase; Hunting he loved, but love he laugh’d to scorn;
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, And like a bold-faced suitor ’gins to woo him.
Though not sure whence these words came, Will remembered that Marlowe had died, and feared he’d simply inherited the great poet’s genius by some magical transference.
He thought of Kit’s too-brief life, his squandered genius, the son Kit had never dared own.
As soon as Will finished this poem, as it ever was, Will would go visit Stratford, and see Hamnet and Judith, and Susannah. Aye, and his sweet Nan again.
He smiled at the thought of his wife. She would soon live like a lady, if his money could buy it.
Will wasn’t quite sure why, but all of a sudden he knew he could finish the poem, too. Finish it well, and it would be good.
It would be admired and great, and live through the ages, long after Will himself had died.
In that space, neither asleep nor awake, where sometimes men know truths otherwise unknowable, Will thought he’d got something from Marlowe, some legacy bequeathed with the poet’s last breath.
And though Will needed not the money, he’d go on writing. The poetry itself—Marlowe’s or his own—called to him. And if it were Marlowe’s, it was as well—for when a man’s verses could no longer be read nor a man’s good wit heard, it struck a man more dead than a great reckoning in a small room.
Outside, in the shabby street of Southwark, life ground on, the bawds went to bed, and the artificers woke and manned their workshops. The threat of evil and dark death had been lifted from the neck of humanity, where it had rested like a naked sword. The spheres spun on, as they’d been meant to do for eternity. In his palace the King of Fairyland made ardent love to his joyful wife.
And the one man who’d known about the threat and done what must be done to lift it from the unaware orb of the great world wrote poetry and thought with mingled gratitude and grief of the flawed genius who’d bequeathed him such a rare gift.