Loyal to What?

The highlight of the day yesterday, (besides the excellent omelet I cooked up) was reading Anthony Burgess' 'A Dead Man in Deptford.' Storms were raging late afternoon; wind, snow, slogging against the windows, me and the birds hunkering in. I'm now more than a third into the text. Burgess (the conjurer, the sorcerer, of the 'race of Merlin') brings the streets of Elizabethan England alive: 'as we walked, oft slithering, the cobbles were slimy and the rats peered from the kennel as the sun westered and would break the heart of the man who yearned above our filthy lot with its vision of heaven in trumpet colours.'

Loyalty becomes a life and death concept in this Elizabethan Police State. Loyalty to faith and thought (Catholic, Protestant, Atheist), loyalty to country (France, England) loyalty to Queen (Elizabeth, Mary). If you make the wrong choice, (which side holds power now) you can end up on the rack, hanging from a hempen collar, disembowelled, a player in some macabre street theater.

Marlowe, loyal to family, loyal to poetry, loyal to...well he's a spy for Walsingham, who runs Elizabeth's secret service, so Marlowe is loyal to a secret theater where it's hard to tell what is in a man's heart and head. What is real, what is shadow? Who is friend, who is foe? This all has resonance today: see Washington D.C. (the secret theater of the CIA) see Iraq (a police state devolving into chaos). Friend and foe begin to look like one another, two sides of the same coin. We decide to be loyal to which shadow?