They come, they go, they trot, they dance: but no speech of death. All that is good sport. But if she [that is, Death] be once come and, on a sudden and openly, surprise either them, their wives, their children, or their friends, what torments, what outcries, what rage, and what despair cloth then overwhelm them? . . .At the stumbling of a horse, at the fall of a stone, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently ruminate, and say with ourselves, What if it were death itself?
England herself was sick: the euphoria of 1588 at the defeat of the Spanish Armada had soured by 1593; Philip Sidney, the stellar fire of English civilization, had died at Zutphen; Raleigh was in disgrace; Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, with its odor of brimstone and despair, was touring the provinces. At a performance of the play in Exeter the actors noticed there was one devil too many in the damnation scene: they closed the show and left the place in terror, and the actor Alleyn wore a
In London, if we can trust Jonson's portrait in The Alchemist, the plague year had a mood of manic charivari, of picaresque atrocity, unbridled lust and ingenious crime. Law was ridiculed or in abeyance. The hero was the cony-catcher, the spy, the con-man, the Felix Krull. That year the trial of Christopher Marlowe for atheism took place, marked by the treachery of the playwright Thomas Kyd to his erstwhile roommate and the lurid half-truths of the informer Richard Baines. Marlowe was not convicted because he was murdered first, in one of those tavern brawls he got into, like Shakespeare's Mercutio:
Benvolio: . . .For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.
Mercutio: Thou art like one of these fellows that, when he enters the confines of a tavern, claps me his sword upon the table, and says "God send me no need of thee!" and by the operation of the second cup draws him on the drawer, when indeed there is no need.
