The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Read online

  ‘If you have ambitions, then you are not like everyone else. Grain, chaff. They think to be born a human creature on this earth is a mere drawing of a mortal lot. And if there is anything more to it than that, then priest or holy writ will settle it for ’em, and they can thus go forth with eyes on the ground and never look up till the grave shuts on them, never look up to ask, to question, to demand. And so we are half what we might be. So what is it? The barn? Marriage to a rich alderman’s daughter?’

  ‘I’m married.’ Said prompt and loud as if to proclaim it, as a man might say, ‘I’m king.’ Though why so loud if the throne is secure?

  ‘Truly? Well, I dare say it happens. But you’re free now. Ah, yes, now I see it.’

  ‘You don’t. You don’t understand it at all.’

  Marlowe blows a smoke-ring and admires it. ‘Don’t like me, do you?’

  ‘Does it always have to be that way? Can’t we go a-ramble about the broad country of the mind, without going back to that plain little road with you at the end of it?’

  Marlowe grins: he looks delighted. ‘But I do understand, Will. Ah, nothing I like better than being the subject of a hasty conclusion. What’s your father? Man in an honest trade, I guess. You think I sneer: I recognise. Hie you to Canterbury, Will, home of mummery and priestcraft, and ask for Master Marlowe the shoemaker. A goodly godly person, well reputed, except when he takes a drop too much and challenges his prentice to a fist-fight in the yard. Stripped. With his hairy belly wagging like a pregnant sow’s tits.’ Marlowe’s pipe will not draw: he resolves the problem by smashing it deftly against the wall. ‘But holy blessed canting Cunterbury has at least a good school. And from there, my fortuitous scholarship took me to Cambridge, away from being the old man’s prentice. Like a cat Kit landed, up tails and away. You hate men who talk about themselves in the third person as much as I do, I’m sure. Why do it? Why do I do most things? It’s like trying a shoe on. See how it feels. I remember my father on his knees fitting a boot to the son of a lordling. God knows when the whelp had last shifted his stockings. The honour, quotha, the honour. The honour of grovelling in stink.’ He suddenly looks lost, like a schoolboy questioned out of his knowledge. ‘What’s the place you come from? Stratford? Is it like that?’

  Will nods. ‘Take away the cathedral.’

  ‘Oh, I have in my mind, many a time,’ Marlowe grates softly, drawing his legs up into the window-seat: his toes rest lightly on Will’s leg. Will doesn’t twitch away this time, partly because he doesn’t want to give Marlowe anything to read into it. ‘I watch it blaze, before the kindly flames spread to the rest of the town. One by one the houses go. Naturally you spare one or two places, yes? But in reality you have to leave it. Once you get free, you can make yourself anew.’

  Will shifts under his look. ‘If you want to.’

  ‘No, there isn’t a choice.’ Marlowe speaks now with pleasant precision: either an angel or a devil would speak so, you feel. ‘Shall I tell you what the one true duty of man is? To make himself. The job as done by the almighty is a botch. Got children back there too? Christ. Well, all the better in a way. You’re absolved. You’ve made souls for God’s kingdom, you’ve been fruitful and multiplied, that must satisfy your Bible-Puritan and your old Papist. A lot of those in Stratford I’ll wager. They cling to it. These are our old ways and precious to our hearts. Never mind that a set of priests imposed it on your forefathers, swallow it or be burned else. Get some vices, Will, live.’

  ‘Now you sound like a play-villain.’

  ‘That’s what I am. I have a friend, or had, he’s lately buried – died of the French pox atop of a surfeit of liquor. He had been in Italy, Flanders, everywhere. Kept a tally of the beds he tumbled into – he had his principles, you see, made it a rule never to swyve against a wall. Seven hundred and one was the figure. Seven hundred and one fornications. That superfluous one gives it verisimilitude, no? I had no reason to doubt him. When his nose began to fall off and the blindness set in he even began to regret. When they put him in the casket his corpse was so twisted they had to bundle it up with straps to get the lid down. And do you know what? I envy him still.’

  ‘But you don’t,’ Will finds himself saying. ‘Something in you says you should feel that, because it makes a flourish of life, but you don’t believe it really. You’d rather live like a comfortable snail for ever, and never see the shooting stars across the sky, and so everyone would, in the truth of their hearts.’

  ‘Dost call me a liar, Master William?’

  ‘No: I call you an inventor.’ Odd: he can imagine fighting Marlowe, as he could never imagine fighting anyone. Excepting his father, of course.

  ‘Why, then, that’s different.’ Marlowe smiles seraphically. ‘We’re all that, Will, the best of us. You speak of imagination, and there we have it in us to be princes in the head. Now employ the faculty, please you. Imagine you could go back, just the once, to see yourself at – what? Fifteen, sixteen? Not to hover and gaze phantom-wise upon your younger self, no – you can talk to him. Take him, you, down to the alehouse for a pot of beer and a good deep talk together. Just the two of you. Would you do it? And what would you say to that young Will?’ Marlowe’s eyes glitter. Will wrests himself away from them, looks through the lattice at the street and in discomfort tries to put himself out there: it usually works. A brawny woman in a French hood, great slung breasts like panniers, is yelling at a man with an unmuzzled dog, threatening law or her meaty fist. Some boys are laughing and shying mud. A beggar sits in a doorway, head against the jamb, face blinking and dead. The afternoon is unchanged and unpromising.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what I’d say to young Kit, shall I?’ Marlowe says. ‘Or what I’d do to him.’ He rolls his eyes, laughs with a sound like stones in a pail. ‘Well, I was a comely youth, and after all, who better to pleasure you, for you’d know exactly what worked? There, oh, just there.’

  ‘It’s curious. When you strive for these effects, I don’t mind it, because I know something worthwhile will come along presently, after the bombast has blown itself out.’

  Gently Marlowe says: ‘Answer the fucking question, Will.’

  ‘I don’t have to.’ Will shakes his head. ‘If we were going to be friends, I might.’

  Marlowe swings his legs down. ‘I’m not going in a pet, Will. I need more drink, and it’s not that I find you any more tedious than anyone else. You’re right, in fact. What shall I write about next, think you? Great tragedy of high-aiming soul – or write about Will, perhaps? The tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.’

  Is that me? Will thinks, as he leaves the inn; well, revealing question. At the touch of the fresh air he is drunk all over again, staggers, and for the first time since his arrival in London, gets lost. Alleyways and stableyards entrap him. Vicious little winds get up in their corners, sending brittle dry leaves upward. All the leaves in London, he observes, whatever the season, are like autumn leaves.

  Her arms, a warm brown egg-colour. He knows where she is in the house at any time without looking or listening out. Imagination. He hears it again in Marlowe’s odd harsh, husky voice. The most beautiful word. Suddenly the Thames flashes from the foot of a set of slimy steps, and he knows where he is. Cold colours coming and going in the sky. Evening waiting to be filled. He ought to go and see Gilbert. He thinks of it, firmly and brightly: he likes the thought of seeing his brother; when they meet the meeting is pleasant, yet always he is reluctant to go. In his mind Marlowe asks him why – or, rather, he smiles, and doesn’t have to ask.

  * * *

  Coming home from the wars, Ben thought, ought to feel more – well, it ought to feel more like coming home from the wars.

  Not triumph, necessarily. A little acclamation, perhaps, to be met with a weary shrug, an easing of the lame leg. Or joy in his heart at beholding this stretch of his native land, tempered with a wry glance at the littleness of a world at peace.

  Instead, this half-slinking nothingness. I might as w
ell, he thought, have committed a crime and gone to prison for it and been released. The turnkey draws back the rusty, screeching bolts, a wedge of light falls on stone, and out you step blinking, half ecstatic, half fearful.

  At least you’d be feeling something.

  He was put ashore at Deal, after a rough crossing. Mariners glared and spat as he and his fellows straggled down the gangplank. Seamen from the ship-owner down hated carrying soldiers, who were quarrelsome, lousy, and riddled with disease. You could only secure a fairly comfortable passage through bribery, and Ben had no money. What the captain left him after creaming off his pay went on powder and shot, green pork, stinking blankets, more bribes.

  At the castle a clerk with a pudding face wrote down his name, misspelling it.

  ‘Jonson without the h,’ Ben told him.

  ‘Musket, flask, belt,’ said the clerk, shrugging. ‘Any shot?’

  ‘No, I fired it all at the Spanish, the enemies of our queen, while you were making lists in comfort,’ retorted Ben. ‘Is that a charcoal foot-warmer I see down there?’

  ‘In your own parish by Tuesday first light, else you’ll be clapped in irons,’ said the clerk, tapping the pass. ‘And your h won’t make any difference there.’

  Ben laughed: not bad; and he didn’t mean the military bombast, anyway. Who could blame the clerk for making the most of a good billet, after all? Not he. When his company had found that abandoned farmhouse, hadn’t they made it a palace against the howling Dutch winter, fires banked high and cheeses dug out of the pit where the owners had thought they’d be safe? Ducks on the spit. And when the fires sank and there was no more wood, they’d used some Lutheran Bibles.

  Which made a mockery of what they were fighting for, certain. But that was one of the first things you learned as a soldier – that you weren’t fighting for anything. There had been triumphal arches and garlands when the first troops came to the aid of the Dutchman, in Sidney’s day, but now the allies cordially loathed each other, and everyone loathed the war. And, besides, you needed a fire when there were wolves about. At night you could see their yellow eyes just beyond the camp. Wolves, in thriving, well-ordered Holland. But they made you feel as if you were the intruder. When you were gone they would take the land back.

  Down in the fishy, slimy lanes of Deal, he looked among the chandlers and slop-shops for somewhere that would buy jewellery, specifically the ring he had taken from a ditch-laid corpse on the march to Flushing. He hadn’t liked doing it, but he had known he would need money, and the corpse didn’t seem to mind. The dead, he had found this past twenty months, were the most amenable of people. The living could learn a lot from them. In the end, after a lot of insults about drunken soldiery – which annoyed him, as he wasn’t drunk, though he intended to be – he found a rope-maker who gave him a couple of shillings for it. The rope-maker was drunk. Dead or drunk, that was what brought out the best in people, Ben thought.

  He ate a week’s worth of bread and meat in a tavern, filled a wineskin, and set out to walk to London. He arrived two nights later, staggering, with blood in his boots: chastened, though still able to smile at himself for turning so soon into the braggadocio soldier. On campaign there had been a lot more squatting than marching.

  ‘You’re back,’ his stepfather said.

  It was late when Ben walked into the old house in Hartshorn Lane. A couple of candles were burning. The man was sitting with a pewter plate on his knee, looking into the fire. He might not have moved since Ben had sailed away. One difference only: a dog lay at his feet. It snarled at Ben, then stopped – perhaps sensing a man who had been among death. When you had seen the way brains leaked from a man’s ears while he still looked at the sky, you were not much impressed by a grumbling cur’s teeth.

  His mother appeared. She gasped, but recovered herself quickly: only he could see the tears in her eyes as she embraced him. This, perhaps, was something like coming home from the wars. He didn’t expect it to last. He held her.

  ‘I missed you,’ she said; and, dutifully: ‘We missed you,’

  ‘So I can see. So much you got a dog to replace me.’

  His mother shook her head, stroking his shoulder. Never a light-hearted woman, she had grown stern as a carved saint. His stepfather shifted. ‘The dog’s a watchdog. We’ve need of such. Only the one man about the house.’

  ‘A jest, a jest.’ And plainly no place for them here. He would have to remember. Black scourging laughter had kept them alive among the midges and mud, the desultory bleeding and dying of the unloved wars across the sea. ‘Can I stay here?’ Thinking: I can’t stay here.

  ‘Such a question. You’re my son. This is your home.’

  Two different propositions, he thought. Living under canvas and hand to mouth, words had become even more like living things to him. At Bergen-op-Zoom he had recited a whole book of Virgil to take his mind off the sound of the ordnance. It was reassuring to find his memory intact. It was about then, however, that he had begun to wonder if he was a coward. Remembering Master Camden and his scholarly method, he had decided to put the question to proof.

  ‘So I issued the challenge. A single combat, in full view of both camps, against the enemy champion.’ Ben told his stepfather about it some days later, in the man’s favourite tavern. Same polished tankard, but the chair had moved closer to the fire. Grandeur.

  ‘With swords?’

  No, warming-pans. They had gone without hating each other thus far. Just a few growls, like the dog. It couldn’t last. ‘Aye, swords. Like a duel. The victor to take the spoils from the vanquished, the armour and weapons, a true Homeric contest.’ Not that he had had any armour.

  His stepfather took a pull on his ale. He looked puzzled. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because…’ He wished he were with someone who didn’t have to ask. He wished half of mankind were not fools, and he wished it were not his destiny always to be in company with that half. ‘Because it was all a confusion there, a struggle without faces, explosions in the dark. But I was real and he was real, and so it was real…’ Strange, he couldn’t remember the Spaniard’s face now, though he had put his visor back, and at one point as they hacked at each other he came near enough to smell his breath. He remembered the cheering, the half-frozen ground at his feet crunching like biscuit, the ribbons on the Spaniard’s breeches, but not his face. And he could remember not being afraid, which was the point.

  ‘Did you win?’

  ‘Well, I’m here, am I not?’ He bought his stepfather another drink, in a spirit of no hard feelings, and changed the subject. But his stepfather’s brain was still on it, like a dim winter sun creeping above the horizon.

  ‘You killed him, then?’

  ‘Such is war.’

  He had, hadn’t he? That was the vaguest part. The Spaniard had gone down, bleeding at the throat, and his seconds had come hurrying to stanch, to carry him back to their camp, and Ben had turned to receive the cheers of his comrades, and nearly collapsed himself with exhaustion and faintness, the blood pouring from his arm. After that there was the bandaging, the settling of bets – at least half of his troop had wagered against him, he discovered – then a drenching rainstorm, which made both camps up-sticks and move to higher ground. Somewhere there he remembered being sick and sick again. Somewhere also he remembered the feel of bone crunching under his sword-point staying in his arm, like a chronic thrill: something far beyond the little sneeze-like thrill of lust. He frowned. It was a story that wasn’t clean enough in his memory, somehow. It would have to be trimmed.

  ‘Well, that’s all over now,’ his stepfather said at last. He set down his empty tankard with a little refreshed noise. As he grew older, or perhaps Ben was just noticing it more, he was full of these drearily appropriate little tributes. To the fire he spread out his hands and said, ‘Ah. A chill breeze, brrr, cold.’ They seemed to satisfy him, where before life had made him surly. Ben wasn’t sure which he preferred. On second thoughts, he was.

  ‘You gained no mo
ney by it, I suppose? Soldiering?’

  ‘None. But saw a little of foreign lands, men and manners, the great wide world…’ He gave up. ‘No, no money.’

  ‘Hm. Well, you know you broke your apprenticeship. But since you were pressed … I’ll talk to the master of the Guild about it. I stand pretty well with him now, you know.’ His modestly proud expression sharpened, slitted. ‘And you’ll not wish to be a burden on your mother.’

  No: he didn’t. So the next week he resumed bricklaying with his stepfather. It was sickening, terrifying, how quickly he picked up the old skills. His hated tools seemed to have been waiting for him.

  He still intended to be the most learned man in England. He thought about it, and about the way life turned, its surprises, its inevitabilities. He thought about poor deaf Nicol. And he gave himself five years. He would see where he was then. If he was still laying bricks, then he would think about doing something Roman and final, as Nicol had said he would.

  Not in any morbid spirit. In the spirit of a man who had looked at life and used his mind. A spirit not given to everyone. Most of mankind was like his stepfather. Hens from the coop, pecking up the same little pleasures day after day, knowing no better. He saw them at the theatres. He didn’t mean to go at first. He thought, after that bloody pageant of folly, the play would be a trifling thing. But when he went to test the hypothesis, everything changed. Within minutes of entering the round of constructed wonders, he knew better.

  Because here, and not out there, was shape. Here you could impose a sort of order. And it wasn’t a lie, because the order was there behind the shambling mêlée of life, and the mind, the tutored mind, could find it, apprehend it, steep it in language, teach and learn. Given the right play, of course, and he was still an exacting critic of plays, after the first starved indiscriminate rapture was over. Each play was all very well, but each had to take its chance alongside the perfect play that he saw fitfully thrown, a teasing shadow, on the wall of his mind. Someone would have to write it, one day – else what an opportunity would be lost. Look at them cramming in, stretching their necks, straining to hear, if not to listen. Only a bear-baiting or a hanging drew a bigger crowd.