Read Online Alms for Oblivion by Philip Gooden - Free Book Online Page B

and sister fall in love and couch together as long as they constantly lament their sinful state. However they don’t, rather they
enjoy it.”
    “Indeed, they seem somewhat earthy characters.”
    “Oh come on, you know that audiences like nothing more than a spot of filth. Which is just what the shareholders object to. They’re getting old.”
    “But it is the better part of the play, the brother-and-sister love,” I said.
    He took this for more of a compliment than it was.
    “Thank you, Nicholas. I knew I could rely on you, with your ear for true feeling and real poetry. We men of taste must stick together, you know. Even if Burbage and Heminges don’t
appreciate my work there are others who do. But you say ‘the better part’ – does that mean that there are aspects of
The World’s Diseas’d
which you consider to
be, ah, not so good?”
    Richard Milford was still a sensitive creature underneath The shell of his success was thin. He fixed me with a hard stare. He had a little peculiarity in his eyes which was disconcerting when
you first noticed it: one of the irises was heavily flecked with green while the other was pure blue.
    “I thought that some of the matter was . . . a little sensational.”
    “Such as?”
    “The severed head and the cut-off arms together in the one scene perhaps.”
    “It is a satire on cruelty.”
    “I thought it was a tragedy.”
    “A satirical tragedy. Or a tragical satire. Or what you will. Those limbs are made of wax, by the way, designed for torment by the cunning of Duke Ferrobosca. They are not real, you
know.”
    “But the heart of the wicked Cardinal torn out at the end and brandished before the audience, that is real.”
    They’d use a sheep’s heart but it would still be real in the sense I meant.
    “Nicholas, I tell you,” Richard told me, “this is the way the drama is going.”
    I had to acknowledge that he might be right. You could never lose out by underestimating the taste of an audience, at least when it came to violence. Audiences are funny things though. If you
offended them in their proprieties – by advertising the blessings of incest for instance – you ran the risk of failure.
    Even so, I was surprised at the direction Richard Milford’s writing had taken, from the lightness and sugariness of his early pieces to the violent colouring of this latest offering. He
might well be correct that the drama was getting darker. By contrast, his own personal circumstances were nothing but sunny. For one thing, he was achieving some professional success. For another,
he’d recently married. His wife, Lucy, was a pretty, demure piece. She was a gentlewoman.
    And not only had Richard Milford got himself a wife, he’d acquired a patron too. I’ve mentioned already that he seemed to model himself on William Shakespeare: coming from the same
country, setting himself up as a playwright and also trying to establish himself as a pure poet. And the one thing a poet needs above all is a patron.
    In his early days William Shakespeare had a patron – Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Even I, a relatively unknown actor, had exchanged words on two occasions with Wriothesley. I
remembered his candid gaze. Shakespeare was still, as far as I knew, friends with the Earl although Southampton had been lucky to escape with his life after the Earl of Essex’s rebellion and
he yet lived in the shadow of disgrace. WS had dedicated his poem of
Venus and Adonis
to this nobleman, when he was young, when they were both young.
    A little while ago Richard Milford decided that he too required a sponsor and fastened on a noble sprig to garnish his first book of verse. So in the front of
A Garland
appeared a florid
tribute to one R.V., Robert Venner. Venner was the son of some obscure lord from some backwater Loamshire or Clod Hall. Whatever furrow he’d sprouted from, Venner was entitled to be addressed
as Lord Robert. He was no Southampton though. No great port, he