The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Read online

  ‘I hushed ’em. He woke up and then that made her wake up. So I came and hushed ’em.’

  Edmund, nightshirted, wriggling from one bare foot to the other, peers up through the mists of a yawn at Will’s clifftop face.

  ‘Thanks, ‘twas well done.’ Will ruffles his brother’s head, urges and turns him with hand between the butterfly shoulder-blades. ‘Now haste, thine own bed, else thou’lt not be astir tomorrow.’ The boy goes, drowsing, unerring, with flat slapping feet. Edmund the late child is only seven years old, and thus closer to Will and Anne’s children than to the rest of his siblings – but something more than that besides: he frequents their two rooms, their company, as if choosing a family within a family. Here he chatters; around his father he is dumb.

  Before going down to check bars and shutters, Will glances again at his children; seeking assurance that they are real. From birth, they continually astonished: the fact that they did all the things they were meant to do, cutting teeth, speaking first words, seemed in itself the most brazen unlikelihood. And so his conclusion: every ordinary thing is a miracle.

  Which carries its inverse: every miracle is ordinary. You can live on one, the other is killing. How to place himself between them is the question that he addresses in those rare moments when the mind-cloth is unrolled. Times when he allows himself to ask, what’s wrong, what’s right, what would I have. Unholy times, they can be: showing him horrible pictures of himself. Here are some. First married, Susannah new-born: wakened at midnight by her cry, he took the opportunity to light a taper downstairs, open his book-bundle. And then Anne appearing at the door, creamy-white, sleep-ripe: Whatever are you doing? Mild bewilderment: as if she had found him counting peas, or playing with a toy drum. Or worse: when little Hamnet, inquisitive, destructive, found the book-bundle, and Will came upon him in the midst of merry tearing. How terrifying he was, to the boy, to himself: the red haze, the voice he did not recognise booming curses. (Never again: absolute certainty, never that part of himself again.) And some time after, another picture, salutary: tiptoeing Will lighting another midnight taper and taking up the unbound books and finding them, simply, coming apart in his hands. Dry leaves falling.

  And then that bumpy passage, that muddy little side-road to nowhere: Anne wanting to know just what this fascination was.

  ‘I know you are much addicted to plays and verses. Such verses you used to recite to me…’ (He thought: Did I?) ‘But I had no idea you were such a scholar.’ Pronounced with faint, dubious dismay.

  ‘Reading…’ he breathed back his impatience ‘… reading isn’t a matter of being a scholar. It makes – it makes a new world.’

  ‘Is this one not enough?’ Tart and suppressive. Not like her – Anne who loved to dream. Or did she? If he had her wrong, then the floor fell away: he stood on nothingness. No: she was simply frightened – this new thing she couldn’t understand. And that could be changed, if she so wished.

  Yes, she did wish. ‘I should dearly love to read that tale of Melibeus for myself.’ It seemed so good, so right, as perhaps only the most disastrously wrong things could: he would teach Anne to read; it would be a delight to both of them, bring them even closer together.

  Perhaps if she had been a child, not grown; perhaps if she had been a stranger; if he had been more patient, perhaps, perhaps. For several weeks they struggled, seated late at night at the dinner-table, askew, untouching; they had never been so physically awkward with one another. Susannah’s waking cry would come as a relief. Melibeus was a long way off, when even the word this reared like a dread obstacle.

  ‘Same as the. Same sound, th, look…’

  ‘I see it,’ she said, ‘but I don’t see it.’ She looked at his face, then blindly down at the hornbook: Edmund’s. There was hatred somewhere in the room; a bastard emotion; neither of them would own it. ‘I should have learned when I was young.’

  ‘No, no, you shouldn’t.’ Uncontrollably, slamming his hand down. ‘Trust me. Better not to…’ Terribly close to revelation at that moment: the bitter beast almost snapping its chain. Did she see it? He squeezed a smile. ‘It’s late. Let’s try tomorrow.’

  ‘Late. Yes. Too late, I think.’

  Try tomorrow … but they didn’t. In some dark version of the mutual impulse that moved them together in bed, they stopped. And have never spoken of it since. He read, and reads, alone. Oh, he presents an ill picture, this other Will who dwells apart and, in between the summer visits of the players, strings his soul along posts of dream and fantasy and invention and imitation. He looks guilty in it: everything screams that his innocence is a lie, the murdered ghost walks abroad. Please, God, let her never see it. Will descends the stairs at a run and puts up the shutters and slides the bolts on the doors, hard, slamming and panting: as if there is something out there.

  * * *

  Glass smashing has a dual sound, a deep and explosive bass-note beneath the bright tinkling. Exciting. So Knell seems to find it, as he hurls another bottle into the grate, his laugh like the belling of hounds.

  ‘No more, for God’s sake, the landlord will turn us out,’ says John Dutton.

  ‘Turn us out, will he?’ Knell is wreathed in shining, sweating, dangerous hilarity. ‘What strange manner of landlord is this, who wants a quiet house and no money?’

  He looks around for something else to smash. This element remains among the players: yes, there are the Wilsons and Tarltons, socially aspiring, anxious of reputation, but always this dark flame licks beneath. Jack Towne watches, expression divided. He has exerted himself greatly to chivvy Knell out of his dumps, and it seems he has succeeded. And yet that sound of smashing glass hangs in the air, and there is jaggedness in Knell’s desperate eyes too.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Knell calls out.

  ‘To see if there’s more meat in the kitchen,’ Towne says. ‘You need food.’

  ‘I need,’ says Knell, holding his arm, ‘one, more drink; two, less of your coddling.’

  ‘Hello, what’s this?’ cries Singer. A young girl has slipped into the room and is eyeing the company with – what? Speculation? Fear? ‘Has mine host sent you to complain of the noise, poor chick? Let him come himself.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t belong to the house, sirs. I only saw your play earlier and thought it was a rare thing – and then when I heard merrymaking I wondered if I might step in…’

  Ah: a local punk or doll or doxy, trying her luck. Very, very young this one – in small towns they’re usually either green or overripe – and awkward: her paint clumsy, her stiff stomacher making her breasts not so much peep as squint. But Singer hails and hauls her in and soon he and Tarlton are passing her from knee to knee, inviting her to a drop of this, a nibble of that. An unfortunate addition to the company, Towne thinks, at least as far as Knell is concerned. His liverish eye falls on her without pleasure; he stops breaking things, sits and sips and is silent. And then Lawrence Dutton plays his lute and sings and the girl, both bolder and clumsier for liquor, skips and twirls about, bumping legs, landing in laps. No more than fifteen, Towne breathes. Oh, God, there she goes. For a gurgling moment she drapes herself across William Knell, who, after a glaring, blazing moment, sends her flying.

  ‘For God’s sake, man,’ Towne hisses at him, ‘she don’t come a-purpose to try your temper. Consider for a moment that the attention of the whole world is not fixed on you and your private affairs—’

  ‘Consider for a moment that I don’t want to hear the shite that comes out of your mouth, now or ever,’ rasps Knell, and his arm goes up as if he would send Towne spinning across the room likewise.

  Towne looks at him. ‘Touch me and you’ll not find me like a wench of fifteen.’

  ‘Now, you two, the girl’s well padded fore and aft and takes no harm, and you’ve been like a pair of cats on a roof all night,’ says Tarlton, interposing himself between them, ‘so pad paws now, pad paws.’

  Knell turns on him. ‘What the devil do you mean by that? Cats, cats, what?�
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  ‘Oh, sweet Jesu, man, he’s trying to sweeten you with a jest, and I urge him to give it over,’ says Towne, turning, ‘give it over as lost.’

  ‘Why do you turn your back on me, Towne?’

  ‘God knows. Why did I ever? I want some air – it’s rank with self in here.’

  Stumbling a little on the step, Towne gets out through the tap-room. Slow faces turn to watch him, and then the man following him. Another moth flits in as they pass out to the summer dark.

  * * *

  ‘You’re right, there’s no air tonight,’ Anne says, unpinning her sleeves. Helping her, Will leans in for a kiss. ‘Have a care, I ate a little onion with the cheese.’

  ‘Feeding so late, you’ll be troubled with dreams.’

  ‘My dreams never trouble me.’ She wishes now she had not eaten the onion, or that she had thought to wash her mouth with vinegar. Not that his kisses are so infrequent but … ‘Oh, there’s another.’ A moth aims for the single tallow candle on the clothes-press, unerring: Anne is too late. It falls from the flame with the faintest of clicks. ‘Shall I put it out? It’s rather a foul one, I fear.’

  ‘Aye, there’s a moon now.’ The extinguished candle gives off a last whiff of butcher’s grease. Will’s shirted slenderness takes form from the entering moonlight, still, thoughtful. ‘Do you ever wish we could afford wax candles? Straight and tall and sweet-smelling and white as lilies?’

  ‘A pretty thought. I don’t set my heart on it.’ She speaks easily, but this whole matter of wishing for something is no light one for Anne. It involves her relation to the world, what she expects from it, and hopes and fears from it. She lives with the world and its power like a deer in a wood: her walks, her sweet grazing are deep within, and the sun warms her hide. But all the while she can see through the beautiful trees the movements of hunters.

  * * *

  ‘Leave me be, will you? I came out to be free of you and your damned humours.’

  ‘Oh, no, it doesn’t work like that, Towne. You planted the seed. You started the hare.’

  ‘You’re mixing your figures. Like a bad poet.’ Towne tries to shrug off Knell’s hand. They are almost beyond the lights of the inn, and the moon that shines on Stratford is touched here with cloud: they are a few facial angles, a flash of eyes. ‘Aye, I know what it is, I made a jest about young wives straying. Just that. And you have been brooding and chafing over the whoreson thing all day and I tell you, man, I’m fair sick of it—’

  ‘What didst mean? What hast heard?’ Knell sprays as he speaks: his fingers dig and claw into Towne’s arm. ‘What tales – what lies about her?’

  ‘None, damn you, or none that I would have hearkened to before. But, in God’s name, you go a fair way to convincing everyone she’s a whore when you carry on like this.’

  Knell hits him: an unmeasured punch in the semi-dark, it lands on Towne’s left ear, sends him staggering but not sprawling.

  ‘Very well, there, it’s done, what you’ve been wanting.’ There is a drag in Towne’s voice as he puts a hand to his face, walks away. ‘Be content now. Be content with it, Knell. Or is that not possible? Can’t get it up for your little piece, is that it? Hm?’ Towne turns, walks backward on the turf, the town close where they played earlier. A smear of light in the sky, enough to show the smears on his cheeks. ‘Miss my sweet culo, do you? Ah, we’re getting there, I think. Pity we had to come this way, but we’re there at last.’

  ‘Enough!’

  ‘No, Knell, that’s for me to say. You were the one who dropped me, remember? It’s not meet any more, sweeting. Remember? Our day is done for these frolics. Never mind what I felt. So what has your little town bride taught you, then, hey? Which way the compass needle truly points? What do you want, Knell, what would you have?’ And during this there are two sounds: a distant shout, and a slithery whistle. That last is Knell drawing his sword.

  * * *

  From the bed Will watches drowsily as Anne tiptoes into the next room to look at the children. He knows what she will be doing: stroking back hair, making small noises of love in her throat. Too indulgent, both of them, his mother thinks. And he thinks: Perhaps, but that attachment to her children is one of the beautiful things about Anne, Anne who first showed him beauty. And now?

  Anne lies down beside him. He sees his love for Anne and it is there, so clearly shaped, like a bird’s nest in a tree revealed by winter bareness; and it was there all the time, but you only see it when it is empty, and nothing more can come of it.

  * * *

  ‘You’re mad,’ cries Towne. Moonlight runs its finger along the lifted blade. ‘I’ll not fight you, Knell, you’re a madman…’ But just now it seems this is true, for Knell, advancing on him, grunting, unspeaking, slashes with wild intent and there are only two things to do: run or draw. (Towne wears a sword, they all wear swords, and the shouts are from Tarlton and Wilson, coming after them with an instinct for danger and knowing what happens when men wear swords and lose reason.) Stumbling, swearing, half weeping, Towne tries both to draw and run. Knell’s sword whips and whistles and Towne flings his up, desperate and clumsy, parrying somehow, anyhow; they have fenced a hundred times on stage, never like this. Backwards Towne goes, up rising ground, blocking and warding. ‘Stop.’ The swords have a dull, clattery, kitcheny sound in the soft night. ‘For God’s sake.’ Knell bears down, bunched and big – he has never seemed so big, even striding the boards in swirling kingly cloak. ‘Please.’ Tarlton and Wilson are almost upon them, Towne can see them over Knell’s shoulder, but too late, surely too late. A mound of earth rears behind him: nearly, so nearly falling, he scrambles up it, begs again. Strikes out as Knell looms. There is a short, tight, meaty sound as the iron point of Towne’s sword goes three inches into Knell’s neck between ear and larynx.

  * * *

  ‘What was that?’ Anne gasps, lurching up in the bed, hand at her throat.

  ‘What? I heard nothing.’

  She blinks several times in the moonlight, in the silence. ‘I don’t know.’ She lies back.

  ‘Perhaps it was – perhaps I was just falling asleep. That jolt.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I know.’ He always understands.

  * * *

  Knell pitches forward like a butchered bull. The spouting blood looks black in the moonlight. It is still spattering and pooling when Tarlton and Wilson get there: oh, God, oh, Jesus. Knell lies mountainous. It takes two of them to heave him twitching over. Jack Towne, sword at his feet, weeps, grinding his eye boylike with the heel of his hand. Wilson tries to bind and staunch, Tarlton shouts to wake the town. A surgeon, a surgeon.

  Too late, too late.

  5

  The Faithful Shepherdess (1587–8)

  Events of a summer night: 13 June 1587. Though what they have created can’t be unmade, it doesn’t yet show. Like conception, it is invisible and silent and unknowable, until a month or so turns it into pregnancy, and we make way for a change in the world.

  A month after William Knell died of a sword wound on the grass at Thame, the depleted company of Queen’s Men arrived in Stratford.

  ‘Players. Now we shall see nothing of him,’ sighed Joan to Anne, when the news came. An exaggeration, of course. Will was husband and father, and his duties must always call him home. But, contrariwise, he was a man at his own government; and if he chose to walk up to the Swan to talk to the players after his work was done, there was nothing to stop him.

  * * *

  Events of a London apprenticeship, 1587. Ben hated it, he concluded after his first year, with his mind rather than his body. The heavy labour did not tire him, because he did not tire. Even the science of making a wall, the laying of the courses, the pattern of headers and stretchers, made a certain impression on his senses.

  But as far as all this touched him, the essence of him, he hated it. He became reasonably adept with his tools, brick-axe and brush, trowel and hammer, and took good care of them, cleaning them every evening before storing them away
– and never saw them without wanting – physically, literally – to be sick. Because of how they claimed his mind: ravished and despoiled it, over and again, took it grunting and thrusting up against the brick wall.

  His hatred of his stepfather persisted, but when they were so much together it was inevitably cooler: you couldn’t keep your hackles raised all the time. Ignoring him worked best. Ben carried a book in his pocket, and it came out whenever there was a pause for a drink or a consultation with the builder. Once he lifted his eyes from the page to see his stepfather, stone jar in hand, regarding him across the half-made floor with a sort of wonder; wonder, perhaps, at the sheer immeasurability of the distance between them, sitting six feet apart.

  But Ben found other places to go, beyond the pages of a book, and they were what kept him braced and alive, ready to believe that the world, if properly managed, was a glory. They were plays, and women.

  One led to another.

  Though his stepfather had been once or twice to a play, like many he preferred the Bear-garden, over the river at Southwark, for when he had leisure and spare pennies. Ben found the spectacle of bear-baiting repetitive at best, but while the blood spurted and the white guts uncoiled there was time for a little philosophy: to study and reflect on the much more instructive spectacle of the audience, their merry cheeks and nightmare eyes. Going to the play was a different matter. He started with the White Hart at Southwark, where they were still putting on plays in the galleried inn-yard. The piece he saw made no sense: the verse was lumpily ill-writ, and the players gabbled their lines and bounced off one another at every entrance and exit. But he stayed till the end. He had to find out what became of these pretend people, tissue-thin though they were: they lived, they mattered.

  Soon he was regularly attending the new purpose-built playhouses, tramping north to the Theatre at Shoreditch, south to Newington Butts among the archery-meadows. He found it piquant that they bore such a strong resemblance to bear-pits with their circular structure, rings of galleries, open space in the centre; piquant, too, that the godly citizens banished them beyond the city walls. Even his mother shook her head a little over the morality of these brash new places.