by Jennifer Margrave

All the world's a stage...
...and one man in his time plays many parts.

I gave them clues: the above for instance. I said one man plays many parts advisedly, for me, and my alter-ego - or my living non-de-plume or alias or what you will. I - and he - played our parts well.

All through the Sonnets - those playthings we devised to keep in touch through code - all through the plays, I double-entendred: I punned at the reality but so far no-one from my old life has discovered me hidden in my lady's robes. In a way, I wanted to be found out for how else could I attain the ever lasting fame I craved? Looking at it another way, it was so dangerous that I was glad I wasn't discovered in my multi-disguises. Dear Will lived on tenterhooks with it, for he was really a lowly peasant who wished for nothing more than an Alderman's robes and a large house in his local swans-town. Which he has now acquired in his dotage thanks to my over the shoulder advice and scribblings in secret.

But I must away soon, too, for as I age and women become men with straggling beards and thinning white hair revealing white pates, sans teeth, etc., the big fear is that, sans mind as well, I'll give myself away at the wrong moment - when a government spy will see through the mist of my illusions - and then I'll truly be dead again. After nearly twenty years of living like this, so much in my role, it would be a great shame to give my enemies what they thought they had so many years ago. And poor old Shakespeare would be discovered for the old country bumpkin he is - and the biggest fraudster of all time. But maybe that will be no bad thing for his old retainer Kit, catty kit, the old maid, who shambles through the attics of his, Will's, London lodgings, the only measure of luxury being Will's best bed; he was to leave only his second-best bed to that witch his wife, with whom he never lived. Indeed he lived with me and fed off the food of my brain far more than he ever was fed by her. So if I was to be discovered? Kit would then be known for what she is truly: a magician of sorts trapped like old namesake Merlin not in a cave but in constricting robes of womanhood - and truly - Christopher Marlowe! He who should have died at Deptford.

Forget the upstart crow and see the graceful merlin, bird of prey, silently swooping on the most apt word, the exact pentameter; so that all who hear rejoice in the excitement of the structures built in the air of anonymity.

Copyright © Jennifer Margrave