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To celebrate this week’s publication of The Terror Time Spies by David Clement-Davies, based around the stories of The Scarlet Pimpernel, Phoenix Ark Press are delighted to announce free copies of another of David’s fables, Michelangelo’s Mouse, which you can get to kindle, downloadable free this Friday, August 3rd. Click here Happy reading.

The burnt-skin glare of day, sun sighing,
Beaching into reefs of deep red light, as twilight reels in the bay.
The darkening night shore smells of nameless sea flowers and of death.
Lights up.
Neon columns proclaim the distant town, and the raw, rough boys.
Out there, beyond harbour; stationary ships, slack bouys,
But hopeful lights,
And here, braving the hard shore edge, the square box windows on private lives.

Trippers retreat and we reclaim new territory; the fishermen.
Moon films of sandy wet, mounded by riggish worm,
Everywhere the bait, under our stealthy feet.
A torch beam blinks, goes out, searching and dipping in and out.
My new found neighbour in the dark? A friend?
His grittish, shadowed knowledge shy of those purer trails;
Bright corridors down the lovely moon,
Across the wild sea, to you alone, to me?
My private, sacred angle,
But shared by everyone who looks and moves along the shore,
And wide as seeing.
A person is like a poem’s line,
Experience the sea.

We are all illuminated, or darkened.
We are everything, or nothing; pebble or the sea.
I loved you, but lost our thread. The cast too sharp, I broke the line.
Why did you hurt so much, for fear of being hurt,
Or fear of hurting? But nothing can be caught.
Cut fish flesh, blood, and a barb,
Weighted on sand slop beach, then flung to the shrugging waters:
The dead-head plop of expectation,
My isolated drowning, or a rising dream of hope.

Who needs a fish,
Trust to the land?
Two girls, hand in hand,
Come trailing the whispering bay,
Suddenly laughing, out of the dark,
Navigating my alien warning, my weird intrusion,
To disappear down the moon,
Like youth.

The world is a trick of the light.
A child can feel the sea through the new dropped line,
Sense into mind, testing the hopeful mystery, then knowing,
Pleased or shocked or horrified.
But we grow into failing feeling, for safety’s sake,
Or trust blind luck, a skill, much harm – the catch.
Or we drown in scales of pain,
Too sharp for human skin,
Cutting an opening in our dying blood.

Borrowed rod, fixed point, nowhere,
Sunk in the sand,
Stabbing the spattered stars,
For delicate direction, certainty,
But flagging a sea of centuries.
Yet the bay held us all, whole, in this element, a while,
Soft kissed the dreaming air, and gently urging swell,
Wide as the swaying sky.
Its silent crash of noise, then boom,
Sounding my restlessness and wanting.
A longing, limitless, or a learning to be in peace.

Nothing stops. Everything is dark and light, moving.
Scales of the sea bass moon glance on a breaking wave.
As the earth tilted back on the crescent,
Sunken to half blood orange,
A giant question in the sky,
It vanished too, over the rim, hooked on its orbit; but a sea change.

As the tide-turn changed our fisher minds.
We both crept up the shore, shifted, wary of cold, failure,
Purposefully drifting back,
Neighbourly as seaweed.
As the earth rolled back, looping the lightless sun,
Curving again, through sleep, into glaring waking,
The stars were endless though, the sea a lovely dream,
Wet sand on skin as warm as touch re-found,
While an ancient line, taught into deeper waters,
Caught me nothing, and everything.

DCD

FROM ‘THE SEED MARKET’

“When the ocean comes to you as a lover,

Marry, at once, quickly,

For God’s sake!

Don’t postpone it!

Existence has no better gift.

No amount of searching

Will find this.

A perfect falcon, for no reason,

Has landed on your shoulder

And become yours.”

Rumi

Enough, “the past is a foreign country and they do things differently there.” If you write something across the heavens and people don’t understand, they don’t, or it’s because our longing is always bigger than the grasp.  I tried to speak in ways better than a nasty fight through a blog too, but you soon find yourself talking only to yourself! Abrams people were never Vice President, Associate Editor or Mr protocols to me though.  They were Tara, Sarah, Harold, Chad and Jason, as intimate as stories can be.  Something died around 2008 and the world and this author went nuts.  But evil is no abstract, it’s what people do and allow to be done. The residue of it all is only sadness and the pointless return to a past that never really exists.  It has been an absurdly long goodbye.

DCD

PA PRESS

In answer to Tiffany’s question “Will Mr Davies write about animals again?” his answer is “thank you Tiffany for all your support. All the nonsense in New York rather took the joy and power away, but I love animals and the Bears will be finished, if just for such a generous fan as you! Then we’ll see. DCD.”

PHOENIX ARK PRESS

THE EDMUND SHAKESPEARE BLOG

Perhaps, in the dark arts of blogging, I should start telling the ‘story’ of Edmund Shakespeare in London and Southwark in terms of Fifty Shades of Grey! The dark arts of blogging being linking subjects outrageously to well known ones, and surprising readers with new discoveries. Except that we do not really know his story. We know, according to the Stratford register, that Shakespeare’s Brother was born in 1580, 16 years William’s junior. We know from a Christening register that he became a player and that he died in the freezing winter of 1607/08 and was buried “with a forenoon toll of the great bell” at a cost of twenty shillings, inside St Saviour’s Church, Southwark, now Southwark Cathedral. The date was December 31st, not technically a New Year’s eve, because the year 1607 stretched to May of 1608 and Lady Day. Edmund Shakespeare was only 27, and just four months earlier he had buried his infant son, who was marked down in the register as ‘base born‘. That very same year, 1607, William Shakespeare’s favourite daughter Susanna was married to John Hall. Was William, now the successful playwright and Globe sharer, the person who paid for that burial? It is just possible someone like Phillip Henslowe paid, or someone unknown. Edmund’s story though speaks of something we never associate with Shakespeare himself, failure and tragedy.

The mother of Edmund’s dead son we do not know the name of. She does not seem, from the records, to have died in childbirth. There is no evidence, as was put up on Wikipedia, that Edmund Shakespeare met her around 1600, but they were not married. However, as Germaine Greer said, picking up the arguments about life and death, marriage and sex during the period, half the men and women in Stratford and across England went up the aisle pregnant, and at least Edmund ‘owned’ his bastard son, by having him christened. Perhaps he and the mother had been together some time then. It seems they were living in a poor district though, Morefields, Edmund perhaps playing not with his brother at The Globe, but at The Fortune, in Phillip Henslowe’s company, but this is pure speculation.

If Peter Ackroyd says that Edmund, and William’s brothers Richard and Gilbert, his sister Joan too, constitute ‘the forgotten family of the playwright‘, then the proving of that family record is also the proving of the entire William Shakespeare Stratford story. William Shakespeare, by John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, had two other sisters, who died in infancy, in those big Elizabethan families, and were buried in the grounds of the Stratford church. Perhaps those sisters deaths played a role in forming his attitude to women. I started this project as fiction, the process of imagining around the tiniest details, and it made a youngest brother very significant to William Shakespeare’s life. Not least because one of the only Edmunds to appear in the plays is that ruthless yet vigorous Edmund of King Lear – “Why bastard, wherefore base?“. That ‘now God stand up for Bastards” sceptic and cynic, in revolt against ‘”the plague of custom“, the airy nothings of astrology, or the providences in a fall of a sparrow, but who is at least given the tiniest room for growth and redemption. Lear was written before 1607, before any ‘base born’ son arrived to William’s real brother Edmund, but it certainly seems that the years 1607-1608 marked a dramatic sea change in the writer’s life. Perhaps that is the theme of James Shapiro’s coming book. The Queen was dead, their father John was dead, then mother, Mary Arden, several player friends and now Edmund Shakespeare too. The strange romances begin, part collaborations, like Pericles, but most especially The Winter’s Tale, so much about the ‘magic’ of trying to restore the world, or heal the past.

But my fiction, and imagining of Edmund, was as much about the danger, hardness and potential tragedy of London life, if you did not make it. Of a world facing problems of poverty, crime, violence and disease, like the Black Death, that struck again in 1603, the same year Queen Elizabeth died. In terms of Fifty Shades of Grey though there is also the question of the ‘stews’ in Southwark, Shoreditch and right across London, or tavern brothels. Both Germaine Greer and John Constable, mentioned below, have talked about the fact that those Stews were licensed by the Bishop of Winchester, whose palace, Winchester House, stood in the Liberty of Southwark, five minutes walk from The Rose, Swan and Globe Theatres. As Bishops in Rome licensed brothels. It might be seen as the hypocrisy of a whole society, or the special sin of the Church, like a bad policeman, but the fact of those taverns, brothels and theatres, also became a sounding board for puritan opposition to the theatres, spreading their ‘foul miasmas’ and even more upsetting freedoms. By the time of the civil war, when theatres were banned across London, it as as if Southwark is especially marked out as the London bad Land, though the area would become far worse into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for crime, prostitution and poverty. Then London was growing very fast indeed.

But in exploring Edmund Shakespeare’s story and Southwark’s, especially around the already mentioned St Margaret’s Church and the group of wardens involved with The Brotherhood of Our Lady of Assumption, the descendent of John Le Hunte coming to own The Vine where Edmund was staying in 1607, I have found direct evidence too of money going up to The Bishop of Winchester. One document specifically relates to a tavern the Brotherhood were running called The Haxe, or Axe. There is reference to a Flemish woman too, and if Amsterdam is still the city of sin, Flemish and Dutch immigrants were associated with the brothels and stews, or according to zenophobic English commentatators. If whoever was the authority though was also supposed to regulate or protect, the Bishop’s hired men were supposed to inspect those establishments, and there are ancient laws about women not being kept against their will. Some of the facts about the Church or State ‘running’ brothels is actually just the facts of rents and land ownership and by the time Ralph Thrale came to own the land that became the Anchor Brewery, along ‘Park Street’, formerly Maid Lane, it had been owned by a Mrs Bilson. Thomas Bilson was the Bishop of Winchester under Elizabeth, into James’s reign, and oversaw the publication of the King James Bible.

To add a touch of S&M though, that everyone seems interested in suddenly, go to a fine old pub called The Boot and Flogger in Southwark today! Right opposite is a gate to a Carpark where Crossbones Graveyard lies. That is at the centre of work John Constable is doing. It became the biggest unmarked graveyard in London, for those dying in poverty, especially out of the traffic of ‘single women’. “The Winchester Geese” prostitutes there were also called in Shakespeare’s day and the plays contain warnings about them and the potential prick of disease. But though Shakespeare was the opposite of the puritan, if Greer is right about him also being the poet of marriage, and of course people change and go on different journeys, what did he experience in Southwark and what was his attitude to it all? Differing and varied perhaps, yet near contemporaries describe him as not being ‘debauched’, keeping away from the everday antics of George Wilkins, a brothel owner and playwright who probably collaborated on Pericles and who was cited in court for kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach and stamping on another, though Shakespeare kept high and low company. Perhaps his youngest brother Edmund fell foul of London precisely because he did not enjoy his elder brother’s success. Pericles interestingly is all about a lost daughter, kidnapped by pirates, who ends up in a brothel, but protects her virtue and maiden head by serving finer ladies.

As arguments with William Ray and others about the Earl of Oxford show, there is a deal of speculation built around the delicate recorded facts of Shakespeare’s world, but one essential element is a missing player in Southwark, the lost Shakespeare, whose short and perhaps very sad London life sets up echoes everywhere.

FOR FURTHER EVIDENCE AND WORK SEE SHAKESPEARE’S BROTHER IN THE PUBLISHER’S PAGES, ABOVE