a chapter from a novel
"One of the most remarkable men of the Elizabethan era was my hardy colleague John Dee, a pioneer in the new mathematics and prominent for his break-throughs in what was then not yet known as parapsychology. His most remarkable trait was that he always came out alive, although he was more or less a downright wizard. Bloody Mary tried to frame him and failed like all the others. He became not only Queen Elizabeth's most respectable adviser, she looked up to him like to a father, while Burleigh, her constant prime minister, who helped her to power, she could never take quite seriously as a much too serious pedant; but he also had a solid international reputation for his validity as mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and keeper of secrets. He was a great collector of books, his library was the best and largest in England, and all free-thinkers counted him as their teacher, master and protector: Raleigh, Oxford, Bacon, Northumberland, Harriot, Marlowe, Wriothesley, Rutland – he was the ideal tutor to them all.
His status grew considerably in connection with Giordano Bruno's successful visit to England under the protection of Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville, which resulted in Bruno's most famous publication, "The Ash Wednesday Supper", in which he openly discusses the existence of other solar systems than ours. Philip Sidney and Oxford were about the same age and rivals on every field; in poetry, in the Queen's favours, in court, socially, in war and sports, both trying to be the best, and so on. Once they duelled, but the Queen interceded.
I always visited John Dee when I was in England, and he always received me kindly. I never tired of him, since he always intrigued me with his secrets. He never let out everything but always kept something left for next time. Only in astrology he was completely open, since he was convinced I was his better in that field, and we discussed many astrological problems together with often quite satisfactory conclusions. It was partly my experience which made him turn astrology aside during his later years to instead associate with ghosts.
The most spectacular element in the booming Elizabethan society was of course the theatre and its explosive power and development. Oxford headed the movement with his more or less ruthless theatre companies, that often started rows in the alleys – the competing theatre companies were at that time in London almost like the gang rumbles of modern cities, but towards the end of the 1580s the English drama suddenly turned into pure poetry, and it struck me for the first time how euphonious the English tongue could be. Responsible for this sudden up-lifting was a quite young man in his 20s, Christopher Marlowe from Canterbury, where he in spite of a common background (he might very well have been some bastard son of some prominent aristocrat who had entrusted him with a Huguenot family in Canterbury to placate the Queen's wrath – she never forgave her favourites if they fell in love or married,) went to the Cathedral school and was sent as a student to Cambridge, where he immediately showed up among the highest free-thinking circles with Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot and the earl of Northumberland as mentors. He translated Ovid and Lucan, which taught him his most efficient rhetorical-poetical style, and was recruited by Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen's factotum and one of John Dee's closest disciples, for intelligence service and was frequently sent abroad on missions. His heavy and violent drama "Tamburlaine" caused a sensation by its imposing poetical force and shocking cruelty, which was something completely different from Oxford's comedies. He continued writing one play after another just as efficiently cruel and bloody dramatic, until his "Doctor Faustus" offered something utterly different again. It was a metaphysical play completely dominated by the influence of John Dee and his wisdom and was assumed to be a portrait of John Dee himself. In spite of all its pyrotechnical and astounding scenic effects, the play in fact reflects the moral dilemma of the conscience when it is squeezed between the endless freedom possibilities of power and the obligatory purity of the soul chastised by destiny. Doctor Faustus falls to the temptation of power and freedom and faces the consequences. He really commits no other fault than selling his soul.
Suddenly a few years later Marlowe had completely vanished from the theatres of London, and instead there was a dominating theatre company directly under the Queen's protection which almost only performed plays by a certain William Shakespeare. I never came to know who this William Shakespeare really was, but from what I heard he seemed to be a quite simple man from the country, an honest and energetic actor, a smart business man and theatre factotum, a reliable friend who everyone seemed to easily come to terms with, a good theatre director and manager and so on, but when I recognized several of his titles from other titles ten years back of some Oxford plays I started to wonder. I never met him, but I asked some questions. My first question was: ""What happened to Marlowe?" For an answer I had an unfathomable "Hush!" with a finger concealing all possible information from any lips.
The last time I met with John Dee I decided to abstract whatever he could know about the matter. I asked him plainly: "What do you know about Christopher Marlowe's disappearance fifteen years ago?" He put his finger on his lips and said confidentially: "Hush!"
Of course that could never satisfy me. John Dee laughed. "It was a terrible story," he said, "and it was really all my fault. Of course you must have seen 'Doctor Faustus'? They are still playing it. It's inexhaustible as a play, and the scene when Faustus and Mephistopheles, who are invisible, knock the tiara off the pope's head, who thinks he is haunted, still makes everybody laugh. I feel guilty. I seduced Marlowe with my black magic and made him sell his soul."
"To the devil?"
"Of course not. To success. To the licentiousness of mental freedom. To total spiritual self-indulgence. Marlowe was ordained to become a theologian. That's why the Archbishop of Canterbury sent him to Cambridge. He was a brilliant student who read everything he came across. When he was given access to my library he never left it. In Cambridge, like everyone else, he got himself into bad company. All kinds of the most dangerous conceivable free-thinking is constantly thriving there. He came in close contact with Raleigh, Northumberland, Bacon, Harriot and all those and arrived at the conclusion that the Bible mainly consisted of inconsistencies. He became an atheist. That was about the very worst thing you could turn into in those days, and he was too frank and open to be wisely discreet about it. He had previously been politic enough to anonymously take part in the debate about the nefarious influence of the bishops and profiled himself as a Presbyterian, which was equivalent to high treason – John Penry was hanged for taking that stand. But Marlowe went one step further, turned into an out-spoken atheist and even held a notorious lecture on the subject only to his friends in the scandalized 'School of Night' of dangerous free-thinkers, but it was spread by reputation and made archbishop Whitgift hit the ceiling, the one leading inquisitor of England with a taste for hunting down heretics and having them burned. Marlowe was unofficially blacklisted by his inquisition but could not be implicated – there was no factual evidence.
During the plague year 1592-93 he lived together with Thomas Kyd. They had written some plays together and were friends, but when the theatres closed because of the plague they were as playwrights out of work. Marlowe wrote epic poems instead, and Kyd managed different secretary jobs. On one occasion their quarters were searched for criminal pamphlets against the illegal immigration of Flemish refugees, who had had to flee the Spanish Netherlands for the sake of their faith, that is Flemish Huguenots. No pamphlets were found, but instead they found some atheistic writings. Kyd said they were Marlowe's although he had copied them himself for payment. Marlowe was not at home, so Kyd was arrested instead and tortured. He blamed it all on Marlowe. If Kyd had some guilt or not in producing the atheistic articles it could never be proven, and still less has it been proven that Marlowe wrote them. But it was quite enough that they were found in their quarters.
So the grass started to burn under Marlowe's feet. He was later summoned to the Star Chamber for investigation, that was the English inquisition, and was commanded to stay available and in touch. He had many warnings, and his fellow student John Penry had already been sentenced to be hanged.
The crisis became acute when an intelligence colleague of his, a certain Richard Baines, an unreliable knave, for some obscure vengeance motives submitted an informer's report to the Queen's Privy Council, in which Marlowe was accused of being an atheist, a coiner of money and a homosexual, about all the worst things an Englishman could be. So he had to disappear at once.
Of course it was regrettable that it had to happen that way. He was England's most brilliant dramatist with a fantastic production already, and he was only 29 with the greatest expectations for the future. Oxford, Sidney, Spencer, Chapman, Raleigh – they would all inevitably fall in the shadow of his dramatic superiority in language and style, form and human characterization. But maybe he was too superior. Anyway, instead of being taken well care of and gratefully given immunity and perhaps knighted for his deserts, he was told to run for his life. No one could take any responsibility for him. He was offered a loose and hazardous sheet-anchor, and that was all.
But Marlowe was above all a dramatic talent with a special sense for ingenious intrigue and therefore turned it all into a great drama – he staged his own death. His ship was ready in Deptford to take him to Holland, but the day before his departure he made a date with three of his fellow agents in the service of Walsingham, to talk the matter over and make his last show as credible as possible. Everything was planned into the smallest detail. Nothing was left to chance. It was a water-proof set-up. The house belonged to Eleanor Bull, a relative of one of the Queen's closest chamber-maids, so the Queen was probably privy to what took place. It's even possible that it was she who demanded Marlowe's rescue. Therefore her own coroner was sent with limitless authority to clean up the matter afterwards.
The four agents improvised the performance, that Marlowe would have been the casualty of a sudden row. Another fresh corpse would impersonate Marlowe as dead, and to make it the more convincing one of them cut a wound in his head. The substitute body might well have been the recently hanged John Penry, his anti-ecclesiastic friend, who suddenly had been executed the day before. They spent a whole day discussing the details. It was Marlowe's best play but a play that was never written.
When everything was set Marlowe could disappear, and the three agents could summon Eleanor Bull as the witnessing hostess and assistant. When the Queen's coroner arrived the body was conspicuously placed on a table with a deep wound through the eye into the brain to make the cause of death seem self-evident. The accidental homicide got away with self-defence for an excuse, and the coroner's meticulous report with 16 neutral witnesses, who had not been acquainted with Marlowe, established the case. Marlowe was pronounced dead, and thereby he would be left in peace from further persecution and harassment. Still the mean Puritans continued long after his death to abuse him. For them, he had betrayed the Church and the religion. He was ordained to become a theologian and priest but instead turned into a poet and atheist. He had betrayed the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had given him the scholarship for Cambridge. It could not be forgiven.
But wherever he was, he could now continue writing in peace, and the wonderful plays did not cease to appear by his death."
"So William Shakespeare's plays are really Marlowe's?"
"Do you really think that a poet like Marlowe could be interrupted in his work at the very peak of the expansion of his youth powers and its volcanic force? You don't silence a poet at the age of 29. Only a fatal accident could stop him. Every effort to suppress a talent at that age could only lead to the opposite – an enhancement of its creativity. It's like a law of nature."
"I recognized a few Shakespeare titles as earlier plays by Oxford."
"Marlowe was under Oxford's influence. Everybody was. Oxford pulled the curtain to the English theatre. His plays have never left the stage but were constantly improved on. Plays like Hamlet and King Lear, Romeo and Juliet and Titus Andronicus were already played in Oxford's time, but every performance added something new to them, and thus they are never completed. Who is William Shakespeare? Just one hand in the teamwork. He was an indispensable administrator of plays for the theatre, and he is the world's most reliable actor and can sustain any part with any mask for any time, but I doubt that he ever wrote a single word himself. Let's see what he has to say when Marlowe's sonnets from those years are to be published in his name, since their contents contradict everything that Shakespeare stands for. He will probably retire, since he knows, that without his mask he is nothing."
I paused a while before putting my next question.
"Where is Marlowe today? Do you know?"
He laughed again, a short complacent chuckle. "The advantage of his being dead and still under the protection of intelligence as diplomat, spy and agent was, that it at last gave him unrestricted freedom. He could assume any identity and freely play any role under any disguise for the rest of his life. Of course he has had many other names since then. Usually he assumes completely common ones. As a lead to where he is today, throw a glance at the dedication of the sonnets when they are released next year. It's Thomas Thorpe who is printing them, who also printed his "Hero and Leander" posthumously with a preface ensuring Marlowe's untouchability as a dead person. That poem was dedicated to Thomas Walsingham, his closest protector, by Edward Blount probably in conference with Marlowe himself with the confirmation of his death as his insurance. But the dedication of the sonnets will be written by Thorpe himself and will be dedicated to his friend the poet himself but in his present disguise as a certain abstruse provider of plays by the name of William Hall, but not even this false agent's name will be written out – only the initials."
"So you never met with Marlowe among your friends on the other side?"
"Of course not."
"How do you see your spirits? As elves or ghosts or something else?"
He was immediately defensive. "Do you dare to question their existence?"
"Not at all. I just wonder whom you meet and how you recognize them."
"Let me say this. I am first of all a mathematician. I keep my feet firmly on the ground. I always did, and that's how I have survived. I am no charlatan like you, who dares to pretend to be what no one can be. No one can deny the existence of the spirits, for those who never experienced their existence are as little capable of saying anything about them as they know anything about the other side of the moon, which no one ever saw, although there has to be one, which nobody can deny. Instead there is any number of people who have testified as to the existence of both spirits, angels and elves. I admit and confess, it's only indications that never can be proved mathematically or scientifically without a shadow of a doubt, but indications still remain indications. Neither can I offer you any evidence that my account of Marlowe's fall and metamorphosis is true, but still the indications are there and can not be denied. Future researchers will probably continue to dig forever in his case without reaching any bottom, and there will probably be a jungle of myths of conjecture both concerning him and Oxford and William Shakespeare, who has turned into something like Marlowe's ombudsman. Every tiniest detail will be carefully investigated by conscientious seekers of the truth, but not even any actual proof of Marlowe's false or legal birth will probably ever be found out, an issue which might become tricky even for many other famous people of our time, since the entire Elizabethan era is marked by a consistent moral disorder. So I hope you'll not carry my testimony any further, unless you happen to survive me with a good many years."
He blinked amiably at me as if he had seen me through, and all since that day I have wondered: did he really believe me to be the one I was or not?"
Short story by Christian Lanciai
Read 722 times
Written on 2010-02-26 at 10:00
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The Testimony of John Dee
"One of the most remarkable men of the Elizabethan era was my hardy colleague John Dee, a pioneer in the new mathematics and prominent for his break-throughs in what was then not yet known as parapsychology. His most remarkable trait was that he always came out alive, although he was more or less a downright wizard. Bloody Mary tried to frame him and failed like all the others. He became not only Queen Elizabeth's most respectable adviser, she looked up to him like to a father, while Burleigh, her constant prime minister, who helped her to power, she could never take quite seriously as a much too serious pedant; but he also had a solid international reputation for his validity as mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and keeper of secrets. He was a great collector of books, his library was the best and largest in England, and all free-thinkers counted him as their teacher, master and protector: Raleigh, Oxford, Bacon, Northumberland, Harriot, Marlowe, Wriothesley, Rutland – he was the ideal tutor to them all.
His status grew considerably in connection with Giordano Bruno's successful visit to England under the protection of Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville, which resulted in Bruno's most famous publication, "The Ash Wednesday Supper", in which he openly discusses the existence of other solar systems than ours. Philip Sidney and Oxford were about the same age and rivals on every field; in poetry, in the Queen's favours, in court, socially, in war and sports, both trying to be the best, and so on. Once they duelled, but the Queen interceded.
I always visited John Dee when I was in England, and he always received me kindly. I never tired of him, since he always intrigued me with his secrets. He never let out everything but always kept something left for next time. Only in astrology he was completely open, since he was convinced I was his better in that field, and we discussed many astrological problems together with often quite satisfactory conclusions. It was partly my experience which made him turn astrology aside during his later years to instead associate with ghosts.
The most spectacular element in the booming Elizabethan society was of course the theatre and its explosive power and development. Oxford headed the movement with his more or less ruthless theatre companies, that often started rows in the alleys – the competing theatre companies were at that time in London almost like the gang rumbles of modern cities, but towards the end of the 1580s the English drama suddenly turned into pure poetry, and it struck me for the first time how euphonious the English tongue could be. Responsible for this sudden up-lifting was a quite young man in his 20s, Christopher Marlowe from Canterbury, where he in spite of a common background (he might very well have been some bastard son of some prominent aristocrat who had entrusted him with a Huguenot family in Canterbury to placate the Queen's wrath – she never forgave her favourites if they fell in love or married,) went to the Cathedral school and was sent as a student to Cambridge, where he immediately showed up among the highest free-thinking circles with Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot and the earl of Northumberland as mentors. He translated Ovid and Lucan, which taught him his most efficient rhetorical-poetical style, and was recruited by Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen's factotum and one of John Dee's closest disciples, for intelligence service and was frequently sent abroad on missions. His heavy and violent drama "Tamburlaine" caused a sensation by its imposing poetical force and shocking cruelty, which was something completely different from Oxford's comedies. He continued writing one play after another just as efficiently cruel and bloody dramatic, until his "Doctor Faustus" offered something utterly different again. It was a metaphysical play completely dominated by the influence of John Dee and his wisdom and was assumed to be a portrait of John Dee himself. In spite of all its pyrotechnical and astounding scenic effects, the play in fact reflects the moral dilemma of the conscience when it is squeezed between the endless freedom possibilities of power and the obligatory purity of the soul chastised by destiny. Doctor Faustus falls to the temptation of power and freedom and faces the consequences. He really commits no other fault than selling his soul.
Suddenly a few years later Marlowe had completely vanished from the theatres of London, and instead there was a dominating theatre company directly under the Queen's protection which almost only performed plays by a certain William Shakespeare. I never came to know who this William Shakespeare really was, but from what I heard he seemed to be a quite simple man from the country, an honest and energetic actor, a smart business man and theatre factotum, a reliable friend who everyone seemed to easily come to terms with, a good theatre director and manager and so on, but when I recognized several of his titles from other titles ten years back of some Oxford plays I started to wonder. I never met him, but I asked some questions. My first question was: ""What happened to Marlowe?" For an answer I had an unfathomable "Hush!" with a finger concealing all possible information from any lips.
The last time I met with John Dee I decided to abstract whatever he could know about the matter. I asked him plainly: "What do you know about Christopher Marlowe's disappearance fifteen years ago?" He put his finger on his lips and said confidentially: "Hush!"
Of course that could never satisfy me. John Dee laughed. "It was a terrible story," he said, "and it was really all my fault. Of course you must have seen 'Doctor Faustus'? They are still playing it. It's inexhaustible as a play, and the scene when Faustus and Mephistopheles, who are invisible, knock the tiara off the pope's head, who thinks he is haunted, still makes everybody laugh. I feel guilty. I seduced Marlowe with my black magic and made him sell his soul."
"To the devil?"
"Of course not. To success. To the licentiousness of mental freedom. To total spiritual self-indulgence. Marlowe was ordained to become a theologian. That's why the Archbishop of Canterbury sent him to Cambridge. He was a brilliant student who read everything he came across. When he was given access to my library he never left it. In Cambridge, like everyone else, he got himself into bad company. All kinds of the most dangerous conceivable free-thinking is constantly thriving there. He came in close contact with Raleigh, Northumberland, Bacon, Harriot and all those and arrived at the conclusion that the Bible mainly consisted of inconsistencies. He became an atheist. That was about the very worst thing you could turn into in those days, and he was too frank and open to be wisely discreet about it. He had previously been politic enough to anonymously take part in the debate about the nefarious influence of the bishops and profiled himself as a Presbyterian, which was equivalent to high treason – John Penry was hanged for taking that stand. But Marlowe went one step further, turned into an out-spoken atheist and even held a notorious lecture on the subject only to his friends in the scandalized 'School of Night' of dangerous free-thinkers, but it was spread by reputation and made archbishop Whitgift hit the ceiling, the one leading inquisitor of England with a taste for hunting down heretics and having them burned. Marlowe was unofficially blacklisted by his inquisition but could not be implicated – there was no factual evidence.
During the plague year 1592-93 he lived together with Thomas Kyd. They had written some plays together and were friends, but when the theatres closed because of the plague they were as playwrights out of work. Marlowe wrote epic poems instead, and Kyd managed different secretary jobs. On one occasion their quarters were searched for criminal pamphlets against the illegal immigration of Flemish refugees, who had had to flee the Spanish Netherlands for the sake of their faith, that is Flemish Huguenots. No pamphlets were found, but instead they found some atheistic writings. Kyd said they were Marlowe's although he had copied them himself for payment. Marlowe was not at home, so Kyd was arrested instead and tortured. He blamed it all on Marlowe. If Kyd had some guilt or not in producing the atheistic articles it could never be proven, and still less has it been proven that Marlowe wrote them. But it was quite enough that they were found in their quarters.
So the grass started to burn under Marlowe's feet. He was later summoned to the Star Chamber for investigation, that was the English inquisition, and was commanded to stay available and in touch. He had many warnings, and his fellow student John Penry had already been sentenced to be hanged.
The crisis became acute when an intelligence colleague of his, a certain Richard Baines, an unreliable knave, for some obscure vengeance motives submitted an informer's report to the Queen's Privy Council, in which Marlowe was accused of being an atheist, a coiner of money and a homosexual, about all the worst things an Englishman could be. So he had to disappear at once.
Of course it was regrettable that it had to happen that way. He was England's most brilliant dramatist with a fantastic production already, and he was only 29 with the greatest expectations for the future. Oxford, Sidney, Spencer, Chapman, Raleigh – they would all inevitably fall in the shadow of his dramatic superiority in language and style, form and human characterization. But maybe he was too superior. Anyway, instead of being taken well care of and gratefully given immunity and perhaps knighted for his deserts, he was told to run for his life. No one could take any responsibility for him. He was offered a loose and hazardous sheet-anchor, and that was all.
But Marlowe was above all a dramatic talent with a special sense for ingenious intrigue and therefore turned it all into a great drama – he staged his own death. His ship was ready in Deptford to take him to Holland, but the day before his departure he made a date with three of his fellow agents in the service of Walsingham, to talk the matter over and make his last show as credible as possible. Everything was planned into the smallest detail. Nothing was left to chance. It was a water-proof set-up. The house belonged to Eleanor Bull, a relative of one of the Queen's closest chamber-maids, so the Queen was probably privy to what took place. It's even possible that it was she who demanded Marlowe's rescue. Therefore her own coroner was sent with limitless authority to clean up the matter afterwards.
The four agents improvised the performance, that Marlowe would have been the casualty of a sudden row. Another fresh corpse would impersonate Marlowe as dead, and to make it the more convincing one of them cut a wound in his head. The substitute body might well have been the recently hanged John Penry, his anti-ecclesiastic friend, who suddenly had been executed the day before. They spent a whole day discussing the details. It was Marlowe's best play but a play that was never written.
When everything was set Marlowe could disappear, and the three agents could summon Eleanor Bull as the witnessing hostess and assistant. When the Queen's coroner arrived the body was conspicuously placed on a table with a deep wound through the eye into the brain to make the cause of death seem self-evident. The accidental homicide got away with self-defence for an excuse, and the coroner's meticulous report with 16 neutral witnesses, who had not been acquainted with Marlowe, established the case. Marlowe was pronounced dead, and thereby he would be left in peace from further persecution and harassment. Still the mean Puritans continued long after his death to abuse him. For them, he had betrayed the Church and the religion. He was ordained to become a theologian and priest but instead turned into a poet and atheist. He had betrayed the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had given him the scholarship for Cambridge. It could not be forgiven.
But wherever he was, he could now continue writing in peace, and the wonderful plays did not cease to appear by his death."
"So William Shakespeare's plays are really Marlowe's?"
"Do you really think that a poet like Marlowe could be interrupted in his work at the very peak of the expansion of his youth powers and its volcanic force? You don't silence a poet at the age of 29. Only a fatal accident could stop him. Every effort to suppress a talent at that age could only lead to the opposite – an enhancement of its creativity. It's like a law of nature."
"I recognized a few Shakespeare titles as earlier plays by Oxford."
"Marlowe was under Oxford's influence. Everybody was. Oxford pulled the curtain to the English theatre. His plays have never left the stage but were constantly improved on. Plays like Hamlet and King Lear, Romeo and Juliet and Titus Andronicus were already played in Oxford's time, but every performance added something new to them, and thus they are never completed. Who is William Shakespeare? Just one hand in the teamwork. He was an indispensable administrator of plays for the theatre, and he is the world's most reliable actor and can sustain any part with any mask for any time, but I doubt that he ever wrote a single word himself. Let's see what he has to say when Marlowe's sonnets from those years are to be published in his name, since their contents contradict everything that Shakespeare stands for. He will probably retire, since he knows, that without his mask he is nothing."
I paused a while before putting my next question.
"Where is Marlowe today? Do you know?"
He laughed again, a short complacent chuckle. "The advantage of his being dead and still under the protection of intelligence as diplomat, spy and agent was, that it at last gave him unrestricted freedom. He could assume any identity and freely play any role under any disguise for the rest of his life. Of course he has had many other names since then. Usually he assumes completely common ones. As a lead to where he is today, throw a glance at the dedication of the sonnets when they are released next year. It's Thomas Thorpe who is printing them, who also printed his "Hero and Leander" posthumously with a preface ensuring Marlowe's untouchability as a dead person. That poem was dedicated to Thomas Walsingham, his closest protector, by Edward Blount probably in conference with Marlowe himself with the confirmation of his death as his insurance. But the dedication of the sonnets will be written by Thorpe himself and will be dedicated to his friend the poet himself but in his present disguise as a certain abstruse provider of plays by the name of William Hall, but not even this false agent's name will be written out – only the initials."
"So you never met with Marlowe among your friends on the other side?"
"Of course not."
"How do you see your spirits? As elves or ghosts or something else?"
He was immediately defensive. "Do you dare to question their existence?"
"Not at all. I just wonder whom you meet and how you recognize them."
"Let me say this. I am first of all a mathematician. I keep my feet firmly on the ground. I always did, and that's how I have survived. I am no charlatan like you, who dares to pretend to be what no one can be. No one can deny the existence of the spirits, for those who never experienced their existence are as little capable of saying anything about them as they know anything about the other side of the moon, which no one ever saw, although there has to be one, which nobody can deny. Instead there is any number of people who have testified as to the existence of both spirits, angels and elves. I admit and confess, it's only indications that never can be proved mathematically or scientifically without a shadow of a doubt, but indications still remain indications. Neither can I offer you any evidence that my account of Marlowe's fall and metamorphosis is true, but still the indications are there and can not be denied. Future researchers will probably continue to dig forever in his case without reaching any bottom, and there will probably be a jungle of myths of conjecture both concerning him and Oxford and William Shakespeare, who has turned into something like Marlowe's ombudsman. Every tiniest detail will be carefully investigated by conscientious seekers of the truth, but not even any actual proof of Marlowe's false or legal birth will probably ever be found out, an issue which might become tricky even for many other famous people of our time, since the entire Elizabethan era is marked by a consistent moral disorder. So I hope you'll not carry my testimony any further, unless you happen to survive me with a good many years."
He blinked amiably at me as if he had seen me through, and all since that day I have wondered: did he really believe me to be the one I was or not?"
Short story by Christian Lanciai
Read 722 times
Written on 2010-02-26 at 10:00
Save as a bookmark (requires login) Write a comment (requires login) Send as email (requires login) Print text
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