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After that, the company's bad luck only continued to grow worse.
Will Kemp, for all his efforts, had never quite been able to fill Dick Tarleton's shoes, and before long he, too, had left the company, following Alleyn to the Lord Admiral's Men. The lengthy forced closure of the playhouses due to plague and a dismal touring season for the company had already strained the finances of the Queen's Men to the limit. Most of the players were broke, and a number of the hired men had quit and gone in search of other work. And in a time when work in London was becoming increasingly difficult to come by, this bespoke a degree of desperation that was telling. When the playhouses had at last reopened, the powerful combination of Ned Alleyn's bombastic acting and Kit Marlowe's luridly dramatic writing drew most of the Queen's Men's audience to the Rose. The wind was whistling through the empty galleries of the Theatre, and even the ever optimistic Dick Burbage had seen the ominous writing on the wall.
"Go," he had told them, when Will received an invitation to join Lord Strange's Men. "Go on and join them. Never fear for me. 'Tis true that things do not look very promising at present. The company is but a shadow of what it once had been; our audiences have deserted us, and our greedy landlord keeps threatening not to renew our lease upon the property in the hope that he may seize the playhouse for himself. But though the carrion kites may circle overhead, my friends, my father and I are far from finished. For a time, Henslowe and the Lord Admiral's Men have us at a decided disadvantage, to be sure, but remember that fortunes ever change. We are already planning a new Theatre, much improved over
the present one, and although the time is not yet ripe, our plan…ill soon come to fruition. But in the meantime, you must eat, my friends, and you must pay your rent, and though your loyalty is the very nectar of sweet nourishment to me, I fear 'tis but poor provender for you. So please, I beg you, go with my blessings, both of you. There shall yet be another time for us to play together."
And so, with a bittersweet mixture of sadness and anticipation, they had joined Lord Strange's Men, who in turn had combined forces with the Lord Admiral's Men shortly thereafter due to a poor season and hard times for all the companies in London. Over the next few months, players came and went; companies fanned, disbanded, and reformed. And sadly, the Queen's Men, once the nation's most illustrious company of players, did not survive the various upheavals.
Bobby Speed came with them to Lord Strange's Men, as did John Hemings soon thereafter. The departure of a second shareholder in the company signalled the end to all the others. Hemings was in due course followed by Tom Pope, George Bryan, and Gus Phillips. Will Kemp had joined their new company, as well. He had not gotten on well in the Lord Admiral's Men, having managed to quickly raise the ire of both Ned Alleyn, their star player, and their resident poet, the young and irrepressible Kit Marlowe. Unfortunately for Kemp, when the two companies joined forces, he was once more thrown in with both of them.
Alleyn had little patience with Kemp's ever increasing reluctance, or perhaps growing inability, to learn his lines, something he had previously covered with improvised songs and caperings. However, the conventions of the stage were changing, and Marlowe's sensational and gory dramas had no place for such buffoonish antics. Thus, when Kemp forgot his lines and resorted to his usual comic bag of tricks, Marlowe flew into hysterical rages, screaming and throwing things at him, at one point actually drawing steel and chasing him around the playhouse with his sword, threatening at the top of his lungs to disembowel him. Had it been anyone else but Marlowe, Kemp might well have taken it for nothing more than a grandiose display of temper and dramatics, something not at all uncommon in the world of players and poets. However, this was not just any player or poet, but Kit Marlowe, whose flamboyant excesses and mad, Dionysian behaviour were legendary throughout all of London. Kemp took fright and ran to his old friends for protection.
So the old crowd, for the most part, was back together once again. But although the Rose was home now to both companies, and they often played together, sharing members back and forth depending on the needs of their productions, there was still a feeling of competitiveness and rivalry between them—and, in a few cases, even animosity. It was not the most harmonious of marriages.
Ned Alleyn's ego ,vas as expansive as his gestures on the stage and, having been the star of two companies in succession, he had a natural tendency to lord it over everyone. Being widely acclaimed throughout the country as the greatest actor of the age had certainly done nothing to restrain him. Where he had once tolerated Kemp when they had played together in the Queen's Men, he now openly detested him and, knowing that Marlowe absolutely loathed Kemp, often tried co pit the one against the other. And Will Kemp was an all-too-easy victim. He simply could not restrain his wicked sarcasm, which was his natural defence, and Marlowe did not know the meaning of restraint to begin with, all of which meant that their rehearsals often became boisterous and tumultuous affairs that nearly degenerated into riots. On a number of occasions, Smythe had CO separate the two of them, able to do so only because his size and strength made him an effective barrier between them and because Marlowe, having once fought alongside him in a barroom brawl, was well disposed toward him.
Fortunately, for all his passionate and violent nature, Marlowe was, at heart, neither evil nor mean-spirited, and his rages would usually dissipate as quickly as they would erupt. Nevertheless, Kemp had become so terrified of him that he had developed a nervous twitch that manifested itself whenever Marlowe was around, and this only served to irritate the flamboyant poet further.
"And so I rose," boomed Alleyn from the stage, sweeping out his right arm in a grandiose gesture of encompassment, "and looking from a turret, did behold young infants swimming in their parents' blood…"
Now Alleyn paused dramatically and posed, sweeping both arms out wide, right arm to the side and bent slightly at the elbow, left arm to the other side and raised, with elbow sharply bent, fingers splayed, eyes wide and staring, as if at a lurid vision of unimaginable horror. His voice rose and fell dramatically as he continued with the speech. … scores of headless carcasses piled up in heaps, and half-dead virgins, dragged by their golden hair and flung upon a ring of pikes…
"And with main force flung on a ring of pikes'!" shouted Marlowe from the second-tier gallery, springing to his feet and pounding his fist on the railing. "And the line is 'headless carcasses piled up in heaps,' not 'scores of headless carcasses'! God blind me, Ned, must you always change the lines?"
"Methinks that 'scores of headless carcasses' sounds ever so much more dramatic, Kit," Alleyn replied in his stentorian tones, gazing up him.
"Well, if they are piled up in bloody fucking heaps, methinks 'tis likely that we may assume that there are bloody fucking scores of them!" shouted Marlowe, throwing up his hands in exasperation. "Why can you not read the lines the way I wrote them? And why is that man shaking?" he added, his voice rising to a screech as he leaned over the gallery rail and pointed an accusatory finger toward the stage, straight at Kemp.
"Must be all those infants swimming in their parents' blood," Shakespeare murmured quietly to Smythe as they stood together near the back of the stage, holding spears up by their sides.
Smythe snorted as he barely repressed a guffaw.
"Kemp? Is that you again?" shouted Marlowe.
In vain, the trembling Kemp tried to conceal himself behind
John Hemings, who was far too thin to help conceal much of anything.
"I can still see you, Kemp, you horrible man!" shouted Marlowe. "Why the devil are you twitching about so?"
"Doubtless he is attempting to upstage me," Alleyn said petulantly. "Kemp is forever attempting to upstage me."
"Liar! I . I was not!" protested Kemp, clutching at Hemings for protection. "John, tell them I was not!"
"He was not trying to upstage you, Ned," said Hemings placatingly.
"Well, Lord Strange's Company all stick together, to be sure," said Alleyn with a grimace. "No doubt, they all think that they are much too good to be stuck carrying spears at the back of the stage."
"I have got a place to stick this spear," said Shakespeare wryly,
"and 'tis not at the back of the stage."
"What was that?" said Alleyn, spinning round.
"'Twas nothing, Ned," said Smythe, giving Shakespeare an elbow in the ribs to stave off his reply.
"I distinctly heard somebody say something," Alleyn said, narrowing his eyes.
