The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Page 13

  ‘Oh…’ Something seemed to shiver through Towne, sorrowful. ‘I’m not sick of talking of it, Will, because I don’t. We don’t. It’s there always. But we’ve had to go on. You must go on, you see? Even after…’ Momentarily Towne was imploring; and he looked at his own beautiful hands as if contemplating a deformity. ‘I’m not safe yet, man. Yes, the coroner found for me, but I’m on, whatsname, recognisances, awaiting Her Majesty’s word. I would have given everything I have for this – this thing not to have happened. But he wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t stop, Will.’

  Will touched Towne’s shoulder. Towne looked at him with complete, stranded surprise, as if he had just woken up. ‘Let me stitch up your clothes, I can’t stitch up your mind.’

  ‘I don’t know. If anyone could … You’re a strange one, Will. Here you are, an old wedded man with six children—’

  ‘Three, for pity’s sake.’

  ‘Three may as well be six. Here you are, and you seem no different from the youth who used to come dog-foot after the cart as soon as we crossed the bridge. Still no flesh on you. Don’t good townsmen start to plump the moment they turn twenty-one?’

  ‘You suppose me a good townsman?’

  ‘Oh, surely. You do have this odd look, mind: a sort of guilty look, which I can’t account for. How do you transgress hereabouts? Poach a deer?’

  Will laughed. ‘Why would I want to do that? No, I’m something far worse than your common thief and despoiler.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ll leave you to guess. So who takes Knell’s parts? How do you go on?’

  ‘We go on as we go on,’ Towne groaned, ‘which is to say, like a three-wheeled wagon. Knell’s parts we divide, and we contrive. But with everyone moving up a step, so to speak, there’s a hole left at bottom. Consider. True Tragedy of Richard III has sixty-eight speaking parts. Even at full strength four of us have to take seven parts each, and then we have to doff costumes like lightning. Take one man away, and you can picture: there’s only so much doubling you can do. Makes a poor spectacle for the Queen’s Men. We have a name for laying on the grand shows, look you, where the whole history goes in majestical procession before their eyes. And then I swear we shall all be jaded to a shadow before we— What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Why look so, then? As if you’d reprove me. Yes it’s my doing, but not my choosing.’

  ‘I don’t reprove you.’

  ‘Are you ill? Hold off if you are, we want no sickness fewing us further. Is there any ale in this house?’

  ‘I’m not ill. Did you say fewing?’

  ‘Did I? Yes. Fewing, making few, it sounds right. Damn words, man, they’re ours to do with as we will. If not ale, cider. I’ll not touch wine any more. No, it’s all a wry pickle: at the least we want a hired-man from London to make up the company, but how to send for one suitable? One of us would have to go, which would only compound the problem. But we surely can’t give over the tour.’ Towne looked Will up and down. ‘What is the matter? Are you drunk? If so, at least let me catch up.’

  ‘Nothing. No, I—’ The cloak he was inspecting slid from Will’s fingers. The room listed and swung like a pieman’s tray. He put out a foot to steady himself and heard his voice say from somewhere: ‘I can’t stay, nor – nor anything. Good luck to you.’

  He got out to the yard without falling. There was a horse-trough, so he dunked his head in it to rid himself of strange raptures and rash possibilities. And when they would not go he stayed thus, upside down and breath-stopped in floating hair: thinking, There is always this instead, always.

  * * *

  As the twins burst in John Shakespeare was working leather on a staple, arm muscles corded, shadowed face grim.

  Anne hurried after them. ‘I’m sorry. But they won’t think of bed without Grandfather…’

  Instant transformation: she had known it would come, but still she relished it. He dropped his work, flung out his arms, and tossed them up laughing and biting.

  ‘And I can’t think of bed without my tasty supper, and here it is. Which first? Mm, thou art both sweet. Peace, peace, wilt wet your clouts a-laughing. Now where’s thy father?’

  He raised his tousled head from their squealing, the question alighting on Anne.

  ‘Home soon,’ she said.

  * * *

  He came up with the biggest breath he had ever drawn, and he was still snarling air into his lungs and shaking gouts of water from his hair as he pounded back into the inn and slammed the door open, and Jack Towne, jumping, said, ‘My God, what? Are you mad, what?’ and Will, dripping, heaving, glaring, said: ‘Take me. Try me. Try me, take me.’

  ‘“The richest ransom that the kingdom yields

  Shall be thy portion; and if my jesting cousin

  Sets his cruel wits to darker mischief—”’

  ‘Not the text,’ John Dutton put in. ‘Wicked wits, further mischief. I thought you said you knew this piece by heart. You’d better have the playbook.’

  ‘I do know it,’ Will said. ‘But my text is better.’ They were in the Swan tap-room, with the benches pushed back. His audience, six Queen’s Men, stood or squatted, chewed lip, plucked beard. Unimpressed, or unimpressible. This country hind? Jack Towne had persuaded them to give him a hearing. Will fixed his eyes on Towne’s, moving downstage. Trying to be easy and graceful and not hobbled by a dozen years’ longing.

  ‘“His proper toils I shall upon him turn.

  For though the snake its venom tastes unharmed,

  ’Tis otherwise with e’en the supplest villain

  Kindred to the serpent kind.”’

  ‘Why do you say your alteration is better?’ Robert Wilson, the quietest.

  Will knew about quiet ones. ‘Wicked wits trips too merrily. We don’t feel it. Cruel catches like thorn or nettle.’

  Wilson inclined his head. ‘And further?’

  Will shrugged: he wanted to be performing. ‘Oh, further says only one thing. Darker says several things at once.’

  ‘Which can lead to confusion.’ Wilson smiled.

  ‘Have a care, my friend,’ Tarlton said, uncorking a cider-jug. ‘Master Wilson had a hand in the composition of this, did you not?’

  ‘It’s your work?’ Will swallowed. ‘I’m sorry – sorry a thousand times.’

  ‘I had a hand in it, as Tarlton says, along with half a dozen others,’ Wilson says gently, ‘and we all wrought as best we could. The thousand apologies are rather too many.’

  ‘Oh, but still, I wouldn’t have spoken. Anyone who writes – who makes these things—’

  ‘Can we get on?’ John Dutton said, shuffling through the playbooks. ‘That wasn’t perhaps a good choice. Peristratus is a chief part, after all. And if we were to think of taking on a hired-man outside London – which I for one am far from sure about – then you must understand what would be required of you.’

  ‘Mere drudging factotum,’ Tarlton said, beaming at Will and drinking to him, ‘with your choicest part the Second Squire, who says, “Yes my lord”, twice.’

  ‘Care of the wardrobe besides,’ said John Singer. ‘Scribe the parts, and shoe the horses if put to it.’

  ‘This isn’t scaring me,’ Will said.

  ‘Try King Leir. It’s new, you won’t know this.’ Dutton passed him a playbook: manuscript, and the hand not at all clear. ‘Proud old dolt of a king divides his kingdom between his daughters. Two of them are bitches. This is one, Gonorill. You’re Skalliger, her toad-eater. Oh, damn it, we need Cooke for her. Where is he?’

  ‘Gone to stool again,’ Towne said. ‘He will eat of the green fruit. Here, I’ll take the part, I can still outwoman the best of ’em.’ Will saw an eye roll, a cheek distend at that. ‘Come, Will, we must look over the same book. Where, now … “I prithee, Skalliger, tell me, if thou know, By any means to rid me of this woe.”’

  Towne did not so much raise the pitch of his voice as lower it, finding helpless softness deep down. His hand rest
ed lightly on Will’s arm: inviting, urging.

  ‘“Your many favours still bestowed on me, Bind me in duty to advise Your Grace…”’ Throw the voice forward without shouting: how was it done? These last few years he had recited only in a whisper, alone in dead of night or on the open road, like his father pattering prayers. ‘“The large allowance which he hath from you, Is that which makes him so forget himself…”’ Resurrect the Will who used to declaim to the fields, putting all his love into it. Towne’s eyes searched his, challenging. You have to put all your love into it. None left over. This, this, I want this. The crabbed script wavered before his eyes; he blinked sweat.

  ‘“For why, abundance maketh us forget

  That ever frugal pinch and dearth existed.”’

  ‘That’s not the line,’ John Dutton grumbled. ‘It’s The fountains—’

  ‘“As when the fountains fail, and men bemoan

  Who yesterday full cups threw in the dust—”’

  ‘Text, text. You’re making it up.’

  ‘Making it better,’ Wilson said narrowly. Tarlton’s jug was suspended. Stratford faces peered at the smeared window: what’s afoot? ‘Go on.’

  Towne touched his fingers.

  ‘“Well, Skalliger, for thy kind advice herein,

  I will not be ungrateful, if I live…”’

  Will made out the word Exit on the shaking page. Shaking because he was shaking, because from nowhere had come this chance, mad and unmissable, as if old and dozing stiff-jointed by the ashes you found a fairy before you saying, Be young. He blinked the slouching words upright. Short soliloquy, make it count.

  “‘Go, viperous woman, shame to all thy sex:

  The heavens, no doubt, will punish thee for this:

  And me a villain, that to curry favour…’”

  What? Have given the daughter counsel ’gainst the father. God, writ with a ham fist. ‘“Have blown her daughter’s hate, unnatural kindled—”’

  ‘Text—’

  ‘Bugger the text, listen.’

  ‘Constrain, Will, don’t saw the air,’ Towne whispered. Will put the book down, drew closer to his audience. He was not Will, he was Skalliger, counsellor to an ancient princess: he was someone else; never had he been so entirely, freely himself. He turned out his palms, levelled his voice. For this to happen, a man had had to die, and so he must be glad of that. A lesson.

  ‘“But us the world doth this experience give,

  That he that cannot flatter, cannot live.”’

  Towne glanced at Tarlton. ‘Pitched well, hey?’

  A man had died; what else must happen? Frightening, this huge acceptance. Write your name with the proffered pen of fire, knowing that once done, something far off in place or years was being prepared for you; hear, perhaps, the faint chunk and clink of it. The Queen’s Men were whispering, heads down. The craning heads at the window blotted the everyday sun.

  ‘And this experience shows, there’s nothing made, Without some other thing is sore betrayed,’ Will said.

  ‘What?’ Dutton tossed down the playbook. ‘You invent too much.’

  ‘How is that possible?’ he enquired politely; then thought, No, don’t. Step back. ‘Your pardon. I – gentle sirs, you know I will do, I will be, anything. I will…’ And suddenly you find you have said it: the real last line.

  * * *

  He told his father first, in the workshop: it seemed natural.

  John Shakespeare roamed back and forth, stared at Will’s face and then at the door. He had nowhere to go but outrage, and even there he found precious little room. He could only repeat himself: ‘They are players.’

  ‘They are the Queen’s Men. They act under royal patent. They are everywhere assured success. If I were offered a place in any other trade that prospered so—’

  ‘It is not a trade.’ His father’s voice was dull with shock. ‘They are players.’

  ‘Call it a profession, then, or what you will. No, call it this: a living. They have need, and I have ability, I have readiness, I have – inclination, a very great inclination. Father, here is opportunity. Their travels end in London, where there are theatres, permanent theatres, being new-built all the time, and a man following the player’s trade will never lack employment. It’s a prosperous chance, just like Richard Field going to London to be a printer.’

  ‘Richard went as prentice, bound by seven years’ articles to a guild trade. There’s no Worshipful Company of Players, I think?’

  No: thank God. Will tried to keep the thought from showing on his face.

  ‘And you say they will take you only as a hired-man. Not a company member – such as it is. Will…’ His father gestured helplessly: his capable hands couldn’t hold or shape this. ‘This is speculation, of the wildest sort.’

  Again Will thought behind the screen of his face: not like speculation in wool, with the courts watching you. ‘Father, to this profession – to these people, I am worth something. What am I worth here? Aye, I turn my hand to your business, but there’s Gilbert working for you too, and Richard likely to be handier than either of us. In the fattest year, this shop couldn’t support three grown sons. And, besides, I have—’

  ‘You have a wife and three children,’ his father said, with a faint smile, like someone answering a riddle.

  ‘All the more reason to make something of myself. On my own account.’

  The screen must have shifted, for his father said, with sudden violence: ‘It would have been better, more honest, simply to run away one night, surely. If escape is all you want.’

  Will turned away from him and breathed deep while thinking: I could kill you, Father, for saying that. I truly find it possible and palatable in the imagining … But, then, he had never had any trouble imagining anything. It was the living part that was problematic.

  ‘I don’t want to escape,’ he said at last. ‘Though escape is at least an action, and so has a little of bold spirit about it, hey?’ He glanced around the shop, as if estimating its dimensions. ‘Unlike hiding, hiding for the rest of your days.’

  ‘You’ll come back. You’ll crawl back in patches with nothing.’ His father’s face was suffused with blood, livid like a hanged man’s. ‘That’s what I dread to see, Will. Your humiliation. If I say I forbid it, it’s because of that—’

  ‘Forbid? How? For God’s sake, I’m a man grown, husband and father myself. You’re in no place to forbid.’

  ‘Aye, so.’ All at once his father was calmer: soft, almost playful. Almost. ‘You are husband and father, as you say, and there lies your responsibility. And if your wife should say nay, it’s a different matter. Yes?’

  Yes: Will didn’t have to say it.

  * * *

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Anne. ‘These players want you to go with them? They asked you?’

  ‘I asked them. They have need … I have need.’

  ‘How long would you be gone? What do you— Will, what does it mean?’

  She listened to him explaining, while she picked up after the twins. Never Susannah, always neat. The north of the country, then the east coast … Lodging and eating together. Hamnet’s old teething-ring: needed throwing out, but he was perversely attached to it. An emotional child, quick to trouble. Then London. Anne, you know I have always loved the play, and it seems I have aptitude enough … I ought to be more surprised. Oh, I’m shocked and sick and wondering and angry and terrified, but there’s this at the centre: call it unsurprise. It was never – it was never likely, was it, this happiness? Once in London, if I can establish myself … then when I return … She picked up the wooden toys he had carved, the doll, the horse. He had put so much detail into them it was almost excessive: the children had been frightened of them at first. With luck – with good fortune – I should be able to send home money—

  ‘And our marriage?’ she said. How flat her own voice sounded, as if she were reminding him to bring firewood. But the fire was in her.

  ‘Anne, it’s sudden, I kn
ow.’ He reached for her hand: she got hold of his and tossed it aside, like something slimy crawling.

  ‘No, Will. Nothing of that, I thank you. I just want to know – which marriage is this? The one I thought I had, against all the odds, the sweet one top-full of worth and truth? Or the one the gossips rubbed their hands over – the one you were forced into, the bitter one, the one folk said you’d rue?’

  He stood hollow-eyed and handsome, holding out weakly beseeching hands to her, and he was every man craving indulgence of his folly before every woman fuming with hands on hips, and nothing was unique or valuable any more, and she ran from him. Out of the house.

  The Shottery field path. Well, whatever hidden part of her heart impelled her here, it wasn’t that she was seeking the old home. No, she had only one home, ever: it was with him, alas. Across the gold day, across the fields moved one of those summer rain-showers that you can see whole, like a net trawling the land. She was wetted, then dry in moments, except her face.

  Will caught up with her. ‘I love you. It isn’t about love.’ He panted, holding the stitch in his side. ‘And when I come back—’

  ‘What for?’ She wanted to lash and sting, though any weapon she took up would only rip and lacerate her own hands. ‘Come back, what for?’

  ‘This is where I began and this is where I begin and end, with you. Give me a pin.’

  ‘What?’

  Pale, deft, he took one from her waist. The touch was still familiar and beautiful and therefore a screaming insult to her pain. He waded through long grass into tree-shade, knelt down, and plucked up a little bare patch of soil.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Blood. Call it heart’s blood.’ He had driven the pin deep into his thumb and left it there, obscenely protruding, while he squeezed the rich dribbling redness on to the earth. ‘Wherever I go, I will still be here.’ He began scraping together stones over the spot, heaping them up into a little cairn. Soon his hands were red.

  She said weakly: ‘Don’t.’

  He shrugged as he worked, his face long and white. ‘It’s blood. Not words, or not just words. I know you don’t trust those. When I come back, I’ll find this.’