The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Page 21

  Three playhouses open – Theatre, Curtain, Rose – but no shortage of audiences. Nor, alas, of stupidity. He didn’t just mean the aping, gaping groundlings: my lord in the balcony was often as dull to the quality of the fare. Which was to Ben still exasperatingly mixed: he adored and detested together. He had seen too much of sloppy imperfection abroad to tolerate it here on the stage, where man was in control, where an example could be made of balance, taste, order. Still the dullards of high and low clapped in the wrong places and would not use their minds. Even in Marlowe; and while Marlowe had been emperor when Ben left, he came back to find him only a king. The rich territory of the drama was being disputed. A good thing, Ben thought. But in time some arbiter of taste would be needed, to sort out these jostling pretenders. To lay down the rules, if you liked.

  ‘Ah, but who is to do it? A man would have to wield a great deal of authority,’ said Master Camden. Ben had taken courage, washed off the brick-dust, and called on him at Westminster School. He expected the sight of the hall, the smell of slate and stove and hot fresh learning, to hurt him with the knife of what might have been. No sharper knife … But he felt little. A pinprick. He was rapidly putting on flesh – in more than one way, it seemed. Well, a thick hide was good too.

  ‘Authority, exactly so. Which is what learning gives you. That’s why a pupil hearkens to a master. Besides, good sir, I remember you yourself saying our English was still too raw for a refined literature.’

  ‘Did I say that? A little arrogant in me. I don’t know, Benjamin: can we fence Parnassus? These plays grow as they list, I think: they thrive in the sunshine of general approbation. Would they thrive under glass? Again I don’t know.’ A smile. ‘I grow less certain of things as I get older.’

  Ben found quite the opposite – but he held his tongue. He venerated Master Camden still, even if he felt, a little treacherously, that he had lived too easy up here with his books, monastic. Also Master Camden was inherently modest and humble. Again Ben venerated it – but he felt it would not do for him, any more than a lowering diet and chastity. You had to live by what suited.

  And the theatre – yes, give him a throne of judgement, and he would speak on it ex cathedra, tell the world what was wrong with it and how it could be better. Marlowe was magnificent. Marlowe had faults. And so did this new king, or pretender perhaps, William Shakespeare.

  ‘Who is he? A player. Just a player.’ Nicol was gone but there were still a few familiar faces among the young sufferers of play-sickness who gathered in theatre-side alehouse and skittle-yard. ‘With Lord Strange’s Men now, I fancy. Harry Six is his, yes, and the Shrew, and Crookback. Those I know for certain. Others he may have had a hand in.’

  ‘A player? Not a man of learning? How long a player?’

  But his acquaintance – a thick-necked scrivener’s apprentice with a half-broken donkey voice – had little more to tell him. Ben suspected he had never liked him since he had corrected his grammar once, in front of his peers. Well, a scrivener should know better. Resentment, alas, was the reformer’s lot. He was only trying to improve him.

  As for finding out more about Master Shakespeare, Ben found that no easy task. Things heard, from asking around: Shakespeare, yes, a player. You might have seen him in something. In his Harry Six, I think. No, I think not. Plays drolls. No, tragical parts. He’s from the country, I hear. A butcher’s son. No, a lawyer’s clerk. No, usher in a school. Very young. Younger than Marlowe. No, thirty and more … Ben even came across one alehouse gibberer who twitched and winked, and for the price of a pint confided at last the mystical truth he knew: that Shakespeare was not really a play-maker at all, and the plays he put his name to were brought to the theatre by night in a silk-tied bundle, with a peer’s coronet on the seal. Then he fell over sideways.

  Oh, he was real enough, of course, but certainly elusive. Even after Ben saw him and admired him in a play, remembered indeed admiring him in other things, a natural presence, understated, still afterwards he found he couldn’t quite bring back his face in his mind. Something indeterminate in its good looks. And when he waited about with the other play-sick outside the Curtain to watch the players leave, he still found that Shakespeare had walked past him before he realised who he was – and even then he had to look again at the slender, taut-shouldered figure making its solitary quick way down the street to be sure: yes, that was him. It was as if he were one of those little bubbles on the surface of the eye that you had to concentrate to make yourself aware of. Always there: part of you.

  Ben nearly ran after him, that first time. Not sure what for, unless to say: ‘Master Shakespeare, you have it. In you I hear the true note of poetry. And unlike Marlowe it is the poetry that might fall from the lips of mortals, all too mortal, and not heroes half made of brass. You have it, and if only’ – well, probably it wouldn’t have been apt just there, in the street, to add that he needed to trim the luxuriance of his language a little, put a muzzle on his roaming imagination lest it turn wild. No, chiefly he wanted to shake his hand and declare himself an admirer. Found in him an inspiration, even. Especially as one of the unassailable facts about this new play-maker and pleaser – yes, he held them, gaper and listener alike – was that he hadn’t come from the university. Ben even silently raised a glass on the strength of that, later, alone, when certain memories of hope and loss visited him and crawled over his drink-mood like spiders in a dungeon. And perhaps there was a little of this: what he can do, can I not do? But shut that out, no room for it when he had to be up early to build a wall in Lad Lane.

  I shall meet him, though, he promised himself. It was one of those things that life simply contained: it was going to come, put together Fate and will. Unlike his next move, which need not have been; it was simply the result of a set of decisions. He chose to get married.

  8

  The Bloody Brother (1591–2)

  Damn Marlowe.

  He disappears from his life again, but keeps occurring in Will’s thoughts where, yes, he cannot make up his mind. He is alarming: attractive, probably not as much as he thinks he is, but that never stops a whirlwind like him. He is lofty, absolute, with the extreme disdain of the lately arrived. (Will at night, before dreaming, walks into that Canterbury shoemaker’s house and knows where the clothes-chest is and the stair-turning and can see young Kit there, fair head over a book, can almost reach out and touch him.) Like Tamburlaine in his chariot, he whips past you, dull plodder in his dust. Yet you feel that it’s himself he’s whipping.

  Will mistrusts him and wants to be like him: that power to thrill and persuade. But he ought not to think of it. He ought to get on with learning his lines and earning his bread. You know besides that Marlowe thinks you a fool, thinks it is a world of fools, and somehow that does not take you very far: it’s a little closed alley with no river rippling beyond it. Still Marlowe comes to mind – or, rather, occurs to him like a sensation, like eating with a knife and doing what always made his mother shake her head at him, licking it along the blade to get the sauce, and you could taste the edge like dangerous knowledge.

  When he does see Marlowe next it is in an unexpected place: in the theatre, watching him. The Battle of Alcazar, a new piece. Will has been up all night learning his parts, steps on stage half faint and dizzy and overheated, a full crowd at the Theatre under a muggy sky, and his costume is the heavy jewelled cloak that marks him as a Moor, though Abdelmelec is, thank heaven, meant to be light-skinned: blacking-up always gives him a rash. He’ll get through it, always does, and once the momentum begins, and each of them stops acting alone and begins to trade off each other – catch a good glare, tread on the heels of a fierce speech with another – then the dull headache will lift. Always does. Always he finds himself, knows he is in the right place, that this is the summation of his wants. And the day it doesn’t – well, that will be another day. But for now there’s a trailing part of him still in the tiring-house where the boy-actor is trying to cover his spots with white-lead and young Ri
chard Burbage, amazing Burbage, is actually snoozing on the sultan’s prop cushion until his hero’s entrance. (His father is the theatre proprietor, yes, but the coolness still amazes.) And part of Will sniffs out to the audience, gauging numbers and size of the box, looking out for the troublesome, the big, chomping lubbers betting each other they can hit you with their cracked nutshells, the simple sort at the front who are liable to reach up and touch you to see if you’re real. He hates being incidentally touched.

  And there is Marlowe. In one of the balcony seats, where the gentry loll. Someone is with him: Will glimpses silky beard, laced ruff, though typically whoever it is seems half crowded out by Marlowe. One of his high connections, perhaps – even Walsingham? Though they say he cares nothing for the arts: if he had to see a play, he would surely attend a Court performance and have done with it. Unless here to assess this play, these players, for dangers to the state. The only danger he can see is that Marlowe will notice the hero seems to have stepped from Tamburlaine.

  By the end of the play, Will has forgotten about Marlowe. Some good poetry in it, and he feels it still on his tongue, a stimulating aftertaste like ginger or mustard. The piece pleased: Richard Burbage, toppling back on to the cushion and biting cheerfully into an apple, says his father is pleased too. So the part-scrolls, the plot-sheets and the playbook will be put carefully away in the property-master’s strongbox, and the piece will play again.

  Will can’t be like Burbage. After a performance he is high-strung, hoarse and irritable with reality. This is how Marlowe finds him, just as he is taking off his Moorish cap and shaking out his hair.

  ‘Will, you played prettily. Burbage, mind, was the triumph. He has such a natural way. Wish I could write for him. Your hair thinning at front? I fancy mine’s going that way. Goose-fat and sulphur helps, they say. But, then, it’s the heat of the active brain that causes it, and I’d rather have that.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  Marlowe’s lower lip comes out like a reproved little boy’s: like Hamnet’s, exactly. ‘Your company, heart. You did well to leave Master Henslowe’s affair t’other week. Some fellows, the ones who fear he’ll put ’em in debtors’ prison, started making toasts and speeches. Oh, great protector of Melpomene and Thalia and so on, and the old brute looks blankly, so they say, “The muses of tragedy and comedy,” and that’s no better. He probably thought they meant some of his whores.’ His breath is furred with liquor. ‘Look, I want to escape yonder grand dullwit, and he won’t lower himself by coming back here. Lord, one obligation leads on to another.’

  They eat a meal together, at a rather grubby ordinary close to the Theatre. Will can afford better than this nowadays; some perverse spirit makes him want to inflict it on world-conquering Kit Marlowe. But the perversity is turned back on him. Marlowe loves it, from the greasy trenchers to the scrofulous barmaid. He has a refined taste for the seedy, is soon swapping watermen’s obscenities with a wall-eyed mumbler who eats his cheese with a notched dagger. ‘Don’t provoke him,’ whispers Will, realising too late that this is the worst thing to say: devilment enters Marlowe’s eyes at once.

  ‘We could manage him between us. A little bloodletting gives you an appetite, you know. Oh, forget I said that. What’s in this pie, think you? Cat or dog?’

  ‘Rat. The meat’s more grainy, look.’ But he can’t quite catch Marlowe’s tone. The trouble, perhaps.

  ‘Look, Will, what I want to know is this. What did you mean when you said we’re not going to be friends?’

  Startled, Will says: ‘I don’t know. Does it matter?’

  ‘That’s what I’m asking.’ Schoolmaster-sharp; but there is sweat in his hairline. He draws something with his finger in a pool of spilled drink on the table-top, something like a gallows-tree. ‘I need to know you didn’t take me wrong. And with you it’s hard to tell. Never know where to have you. I suspicion that you are, after all, a better actor than Alleyn or Burbage or any of ’em. But not on the stage.’

  ‘Why do you need to know?’ It dawns on Will, then. Marlowe’s rumoured tastes: he even hints at them himself, after all. ‘Oh.’ Nearly says flatly: Oh, just that. ‘By friends I meant friends. Plain friends, Canterbury or Stratford friends, if you like. Meaning you and I will always tend to disagree. Beyond that I – I hold no opinion.’

  ‘You understand, then.’ Flushed, Marlowe rubs out the gallows with his sleeve. ‘Not that I care a damn, Master William, what you think of these matters. But, naturally, the laws being as they are, you could make things difficult for me, if you took me up wrong.’

  ‘Do you truly think I would do that?’ Will says, in mild disgust.

  ‘No. But who knows what men will do, if they’re caught between danger and conscience? Or between conscience and advantage. I know whereof I speak. We burn men for addressing God in the wrong way. And we burn them – or assure them they’ll burn hereafter – for desiring the flesh in the wrong way.’ Bravado, but no fool: he keeps his voice lowered now. ‘It would be curious if they should both turn out to be equally unimportant. Oh, I say nothing against the love of women. I did women for a whole year.’ He makes it sound like a soldier’s campaign or an apprenticeship. ‘It was very well in its way. But something, I don’t know, bread-and-sops about it. It’s the only carnality the Church allows us, after all, and the Church always restricts us to the tamest of pleasures.’ Abruptly he laughs and signals for more drink. ‘Noose-talk again. I’ll stop. Let’s talk of poetry.’

  ‘Gladly,’ Will says, though the gladness is a sick, blue-lipped thing, scarcely able to breathe for envy. ‘Are you writing a new piece?’

  ‘Toying. A Machiavel piece in mind. Magnificent and devilish scheming. Fascinates. Yet part of me doesn’t believe it any more. Your Machiavel shapes his ends so precisely, and which of us can plan what becomes of us beyond the next morning?’ He scowls at the wall-eyed man. ‘You want a drinking-race? Why, then I’ll fit you.’

  Will gets him out of there, eventually. The wall-eyed man is retching in the back alley. ‘Weakling,’ Marlowe calls. He staggers and laughs as Will holds him up. ‘I must have thy neck, Will. Pardon, pardon. We’ll set a great talk going. Don’t fear, I’ll write thee a testament: Will Shakespeare did not accede to my nameless vice.’

  ‘Tell me if you’re going to be sick,’ Will says grimly. ‘And tell me this – you can’t truly be in danger, surely? I mean because of your irregular life—’

  ‘Oh, it’s regular, trust me, every fucking night, and you can alter the order of that phrase with no harm to the meaning. Like Kyd’s verse, in fact. I know what you mean, Will, I have friends among the great, isn’t that it? Perhaps I do. But who says that puts you out of danger, hm?’

  ‘Well. You like danger anyhow, don’t you? That business at the alehouse.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is. I court danger because I’m afraid. All the damned time. If I didn’t put myself to the test I’d simply hide in a hole.’

  ‘Why?’

  Marlowe stops and, still leaning heavily on Will’s arm, makes an expansive looping gesture. ‘Because of all this.’ Will comprehends in it the town around them, the unrolling, unending land beyond, the sky of nothing. Marlowe urges him on. ‘I’ve got to sleep. Can you get me home?’

  Home, to Will’s surprise, is in Norton Folgate, an enclave of rackety Shoreditch. He supposed Marlowe living somewhere more fashionable: another adjustment. At the foot of the wormy stairs Marlowe pauses, finger to lips.

  ‘Kyd,’ he whispers, or tries to: drink undoes stealth. ‘We’re sharing a lodging. No, no. Good God, no. The man’s a dried mummy. Only I want to sleep before he begins plaguing me—’

  ‘Marlowe, is that you? Who’s with you?’ Kyd’s colourless face floats above the banister. His glance falls on Will without interest. ‘Oh. You said you would see my lord’s secretary today, you absolutely engaged for it. What happened?’

  ‘I did, I did, for God’s sake. And I undertook for you, and plied him thoroughly, and I was
your entire advocate, and so you may be assured of your interest with my lord. Now I want sleep.’ Marlowe lurches up; Will keeps a hand at his back.

  ‘You’re sure? This isn’t the liquor talking?’

  ‘You needn’t be so profuse with your thanks.’

  ‘No – I am, I’m grateful, but when am I to wait on my lord?’

  ‘Tomorrow. There, Will – just there…’ Marlowe sways and slumps so that Will has to half carry him past Kyd to his chamber. Professionally expert in such things, Will knows he is feigning. Once inside and the door closed, Marlowe straightens, yawns, picks his way through incredible mess – clothes, bottles, fruit-peelings, books – to an unmade bed. ‘Tom Kyd looks to be a noble’s secretary. He wants to be known as a gentleman, not a mere rascally play-maker.’ He drags off his shoes, boylike, by digging his heels along the floor. ‘I suspicion you are going to say, “Why can’t a man be both?”’

  Will is drawn to the table by the window, where there is an astrolabe, writing materials, papers. The light is fading: it crawls across the page like disturbed spiders as he cranes, quickly reads. His mind runs hands of apprehension round the blocks of sound and sense, picks out phrases to find them stuck in him like sharp jewels. Not sure how long he loiters there. Marlowe is in shirt when he glances up, and approaching the table. His throat looks like a hollow in tawny sand.

  ‘What dost want, Will?’ There’s a jug of water on the table: careless, Marlowe swigs, though there’s likely a flux in it.

  Will blinks, shudders, trying to splice himself back into reality, the heartless now. ‘I want to be thee, Kit,’ he says quietly, pointing at the papers; and it seems the crudest, strongest thing he has ever said, like blaspheming in passion.

  Marlowe chuckles softly, breathes deep. ‘Be me then.’ It is as if they have emerged at the exit of a maze: here, sudden clarity. ‘Incorporate me. There’s ample room in there, no?’ He places his hand on Will’s breast, tapping. ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t be lonely. But thou must decide first, Will. Must choose, heart.’ Yawning, with ribbed catlike mouth, he turns back to the bed. ‘Thou art here, but not here. That new barn still calls, hey? You must burn the barn.’ Marlowe stretches himself out to sleep. He gives the curious impression that he can still see you through his smoky closed eyelids. ‘Burn the barn, Will.’