The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Page 25

  ‘You had a wife, they say. You were well married.’

  ‘Aye, and deserted her, sent her into Lincolnshire while I whored. What then?’

  Will shrugged. ‘So does that make a man a poet? Throw everything in the dust to hold tight to one dark thing? One self? Is that how you see it?’

  ‘Me, Shakespeare, I’m going to die,’ Greene said, with sudden quiet weariness. ‘I just wonder – when are you going to live?’

  (But the youth of today, the old man riding at his side complains, are a standing shame, nothing but fighting and getting wenches with child and wronging the ancientry.)

  ‘Soft.’ Greene came after Will on his way to the door. ‘Your hand, there. Would you believe, Shakespeare, I wish you well? For I do.’ His drained eyes searched Will. ‘But just this. Hark. Luck is a debt. Luck has to be paid for.’

  When Will left, the alley was bright with sunlight, and bright horror, he knows, is quite the worst, like the dead cat he saw in the gutter, with another cat, very alive, contentedly eating its insides. Superb sunlit sheen on everything: sleek fur, pearly intestines.

  Drag hence her husband to some secret hole, And make his dead trunk pillow to our lust. His mind was all large white space as he wrote it, and as he wrote one-handed Titus cutting the brothers’ throats, with tongueless, handless Lavinia holding a basin between her stumps to catch the blood: kind light bathed the page and somewhere in the next house a man and a woman were singing to the lute, so sweetly.

  When you make a play strong, you make the world a little less so. Terrible suspicion, that power is the best thing there is.

  He is crossing Clopton Bridge, leading the drooping horse; he is almost home. Next he will see Edmund, for wherever he is, his young brother is always the first to greet Will, seeming to possess the ears of a hound. Here he comes, running full pelt from the other end of Henley Street. Twelve now, and more well grown than any of them at that age, broad across the shoulders, boy’s fairness darkening.

  ‘Brother, my sweet brother Will, thank the kind heaven that has sent thee,’ he says.

  ‘Your best yet,’ Will says, and they laugh. Every time, Edmund greets him with a poetical absurdity: their little joke ritual. As he goes on to gabble out a hundred things he has been doing, Will hears a reed in Edmund’s voice as if it is close to breaking: very early. Some boy-actors keep their unbroken voice until eighteen, thankfully. They play women better older, even if the stubble has to be masked … Very much a boy, though, the way he skips sideways beside Will. All this vitality. As if his parents had handed some final energy to this their last offspring. Father especially: the same fine looks, strong bones. Unfortunate that everything in Edmund’s personality seems to grate on his father. Unfortunatus. Too much of Will in him, perhaps. Loves a tale or a verse, and hangs on his every word about the theatre. Though Will tries not to talk about it too much, here, on the other side of the border.

  ‘Anne.’

  She screws up her eyes as he steps, reminding himself to duck, from the dazzled street to woody indoors. They embrace, for a goodish time. This is always in a way the easy part. Missing each other, reaffirming love: an imperative as if they have just survived an accident, darted – as Will did once in London – from the sudden fall of a chimney. Later it may be difficult, the complex simple business of being husband and wife, but not now. Now there are the children. They come running. It occurs to him that they would do this for a favourite uncle. Quickly he presses the presents on them, trying again not to be surprised at their growth, their rampant life without him.

  He is easiest with the girls. Susannah is getting on for ten with all her mother’s fresh rare field-flower beauty lying ready for her. She is a lady and thinks her father, like most men, an agreeable blunderer. Of the seven-year-old twins Judith seems, as it were, the least twin-like – greedy, careless, taking for granted the indulgence of the littlest. But Hamnet: his great blue eyes seem to see so much, they seem even to ache as if they let too much light in. And Hamnet is not happy with dashed explanations, the things said to a child as you might grab an apple from the store and thrust it into their hand, here. But where is the Quineys’ pig? Dead. How dead? They killed it. How killed it? But the details he wants disgust him. And last year there was the awful moment when he came in to find Will new arrived, still cloaked and grimed, beard untrimmed, hugging the others and then turning to open his arms, and Hamnet burst into tears, ran away, crying, ‘Who’s that man, I don’t know that man…’

  Suspicion – terrible, about your own child! – that Hamnet was feigning it a little, for effect, for – what? Well, it was his grandfather he ran to, his favourite. He was like him in his desire for certainties. Truth. What is duller than certainty, thinks Will, what dead thing is deader than truth? Will tries to overcome that look in Hamnet’s eyes with a bigger present, with gentle listening attention. But probably just being here more would do it. Ah, yes, that. The question that jogged here all the way with him. How long would the plague last, how long would the theatres stay closed, what would he do if it went on? Who was he, as Hamnet said, shrinking into John Shakespeare’s belly. Decide.

  * * *

  The plague begins it, and it ends for Anne with such a betrayal of Will as her heart has never known.

  That’s where it all happens – in the heart, not the world, but the heart is the great arena or theatre, for Anne. This in spite of a shift in her authority: for she tends now to be Mistress Shakespeare, rather than her mother-in-law, in Stratford. It’s in the tone with which people address her at market in the street; or when the women busy themselves around a pregnancy, when one of their number takes her chamber to prepare. Like Judith Sadler, poor womb-harried Judith again. They gather about the bed, commending the double shutters keeping out the poisonous air, flushed and chattering; and to Anne they extend this little extra respect, not quite deference. Notice her gown, of London make, that Will brought after securing the measurements from Mistress Gray, the Stratford seamstress. A risk when it’s only a fitting that can assure you, but it came perfect, needing no alteration. Not many husbands to take such care, Mistress Quiney says, as the lying-in cup is passed about. He thrives, they say: a fine thing when a man finds his fortune.

  What he does in London is known about the town without quite sinking in. Hard to credit that players earn such money, stand so well; but that’s London, all enterprises are greater there, and what with the Court … It’s all golden, to be sure, and how proud she must be of what he’s made of himself, and still keeping up with Stratford and home. Yes, all true. She is proud, without feeling proud. Can is be different from feels? He would know, perhaps. And surely it can’t be envy of poor Judith Sadler, effaced by miscarrying and infant deaths, preparing to go into the fell grip of childbearing again. That was over for Anne – they lay together so seldom, and she never seemed like to quicken anyway, and the unspoken conclusion was, the family is completed.

  This summer, however, not a birth but a dying. Old Master Field, after a general decline, not plague. Old, sir, old, the clawed hands and the brain like a shrivelled apple core. They go to pay a visit of last respects: she, Will, Father John, making one of his rare stirs abroad. Dying hard up there, they say, like her own father. Anne and Will sit with Mistress Field while his old friend goes upstairs to witness the struggle awhile.

  ‘I don’t know what to do with myself now,’ Mistress Field says, as if her husband is already dead. She half laughs, picks at her black skirts. ‘Fly, shall I fly?’ From above comes the deep rumble of Father John’s voice: peace, my good friend. My good old friend, God’s peace be with thee. He is good at this, notes Anne: the moments of high crisis bring out the best in him. Daily life, on the other hand, is a baffle and snare.

  He comes down. ‘Well, I fancy he knew me in his way. But he keeps asking for Richard.’ Sad head-shaking, calming hand on Mistress Field’s shoulder. ‘He thinks Richard is still here somehow.’

  ‘No, alas, another deserter of the family
hearth,’ Will murmurs to Anne: then grimaces sorry.

  ‘It would ease him, I’m sure, if he could see Richard again,’ sighs Richard’s sister. She drank straight from the tap of her parents’ Puritanism: she looks just made for a death-bed.

  ‘Aye, but not to be, my dear,’ Father John says. ‘Even if he could know him.’

  Will says: ‘I could go up. Talk to him. He might think I’m Richard. Well, after all, we’re of an age, a colouring. I can –’ He wants, Anne thinks, to say, I can be him ‘– I can be like him.’

  ‘It’s a lie. Sinful,’ cries Richard’s sister.

  ‘He doesn’t mean it,’ growls Father John.

  ‘But if it eases him.’ Will insists gently. Anne wonders if he would insist so much if his father weren’t here.

  ‘Yes. Yes,’ says Mistress Field, at last. ‘We haven’t agreed for years, him and me. I can’t do anything for him. I can’t reach love through old hurts, it won’t go through. He needs something to lift him before he goes to God, else…’ She doesn’t say what else: just looks expectantly, tearless and grey, at Will.

  As Will gets to his feet his father looms at his side, bitterly hissing: ‘But you’re not Richard.’

  Will glances him over: simply, colourlessly determined. ‘What does it matter who I am?’ he asks, and goes up.

  It isn’t then, though, the betrayal: for she’s on Will’s side. And another time, a week after old Master Field is buried. Summer has temporarily given up to grey and cold; they are all trapped indoors. Edmund, restless, asks Will about the plays he has written for London. ‘I want to read them. Don’t you have them with you?’

  ‘I have some sheets of something I’m working on,’ Will says, cautious, evasive. ‘But the plays belong to the companies, once they’re finished. They keep them.’

  ‘But you should print them. Why not ask Richard Field?’

  ‘He doesn’t think highly of plays. And if they’re printed, they become common property. The companies don’t care for that. Besides … printing is a sort of last word. I never want to say the last word. When there are no more words, then…’ He falters.

  ‘You must remember them, though,’ Edmund says, with the relentlessness of youth. ‘Give us a little. It’s a dull day, and here we are an audience.’

  Will is reluctant. Anne feels the reluctance to do with her somehow. From his father, a twitch, a gaze fixed away. He never talks of Will’s profession except in terms of money earned, days worked. Otherwise he presents a subtle blankness like the Sadlers in church, saving their consciences, probable papists. Joan adds her voice: ‘But naught dark,’ she says. ‘We live enough in the dark lately.’ Meaning the weather, possibly. Will begins to tell his comedy. Then, haltingly, to speak the parts – to play the parts. To be it. Edmund thrusts back furniture to make room, gasping, glowing. The thing is a galloping madness of twins and mistakes – two sets of twins. Only one in the original, Will says. Why change it? For more madness. He darts about the swept house-place and becomes, astonishingly, four people, throwing his voice hither and yon, drawing up straight and big, bending small. No wonder he never puts on flesh, Anne thinks, wondering at the vitality of it. And yet not able to give herself to it because part of her looks always to Father John, the smoky horizon of him, the wind blowing from his temperamental quarter. He does not, of course, like it. But Joan and Susannah and even Will’s mother are laughing and admiring.

  And then: misfortune. Judith and Hamnet come in from feeding the hens with the maid. Not understanding, they blunder into the stage-space, and Edmund gently but impatiently shunts them out of the way. While Will acts people outside a house and also inside the house, by shifting his body.

  ‘“Go fetch me something; I’ll break ope the gate. Break any breaking here, and I’ll break your knave’s pate. A man may break a word with you, sir; and words are but wind; Aye, and break it in your face, so he break it not behind.”’ He ventriloquises a rasping fart so real that Joan flinches away, flapping her apron: oh, fie. And the laughter disguises it at first, until it will not be hid: the thin hard cry of Hamnet. He doesn’t like it. It’s not real. It’s stupid. Father’s pretending. It’s frightening. Looking stricken, Will throws off the actor, bends and stretches arms to his son. Yet still perhaps there is something in his gesture that is a little stylised, that shows he is accustomed to assuming a feeling: even perhaps real ones have to be tried on first. And then she sees, unmistakably, a little flicker of irritation, that his son should be so difficult, so inclined to spoil things, so – well. It’s to his grandfather Hamnet goes again, to be embraced. And in doing so Father John turns him right around, holding him across the chest, so Hamnet’s teary face looks out at them all, accusingly: looks at them indulging the lie.

  But what begins with the plague ends at last with this: one of those dreadful three-sided quarrels. Three-sided in that Will and his father take up opposing positions, but there is another ground on which you can step, if you are foolhardy or loving enough. Summer is nearly over, but not the plague. The theatres are to stay closed at least till Michaelmas, he has said so himself, and now Greenaway the carrier brings news of London still death-stalked, plague-pits filling. So.

  ‘You’ll stay here, then, naturally.’ Father John says it offhand, a thing settled.

  ‘I have a play to prepare.’

  ‘If it’s that manner of work – writing work’ – Father John won’t say it without a smacking of distasteful lips – ‘that can surely be done here.’

  ‘It’s not only that.’

  ‘No? What, then?’ Knights clattering on to a bridge, thinks Anne, wondering where the image came from. Some story told by Will, probably: so many of her mental pictures are of his drawing. Mounted knights advancing on each other, upward sway of lances.

  ‘If I am to make my living partly with my pen, I must look to other avenues when there are no plays.’ As so often, Will pacing seems to look everywhere but at his father. ‘Many a man in London writes in another vein. My friend Tom Nashe is one. A play is for the stage, but printers and booksellers – well, Richard Field will tell you, they are eager for verse and tale. And there are gentlemen of wealth and breeding who will reward a poet with patronage, if—’

  ‘Oh, and a thousand other things while you think of them. What is this, man?’ Father John is breezy. ‘You ran off to be a player. You’ve settled to it, aye, I’ll say yes, and profited by it while you can. But it’s a half-and-half business at best, and now it’s all at a stand, and no knowing if your city councilmen may not say at last, pull the theatres down, if it comes to it. Face this, Will, ’stead of setting up new cloud-castles.’ He turns a smiling, sighing look on Anne. ‘You know I’m in the right of it, daughter. Speak to him.’

  ‘We have spoke, sir. I know Will sees his fortune lies in London, as before, and there I place my faith likewise, and content me.’ It’s true. They have spoken of it. Rather than talked of it, perhaps. But there again she can’t contend, not on the bridge of words.

  ‘You’re loyal,’ her father-in-law says; and, with a complete switch of tone: ‘She’s loyal, Will. A true wife. I hope you value that, for assuredly you take advantage of it.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Will is halfway to the door, just to get away from this, from the possibility of his own reply, because as she knows he is full of fire and he doesn’t want to turn it on his father. It will be too much.

  And this is when Edmund steps in: seeing his adored brother perhaps as retreating, defeated, and that he can’t bear. Will is where he lives and sleeps, like a lad with a den, where he can be himself. Anne sees in Edmund’s lit face that he feels it is up to him, and he likes the responsibility; and in spite of all slights he still doesn’t see how he is going to anger his father as he says, so reasonably: ‘But Will has lived in London, Father. He knows it as you don’t, and so he must know what’s best to do in his profession, and I’m sure—’

  The slap across the face stops him saying what he is sure about, though probably
makes his thoughts sure, very sure. Edmund nurses his face in the shame of having it hit, and Anne reaches out and puts her arm about his shoulders because she must – and, yes, she has been drawn in thereby to take a side or be a side, very well. And Will looks murder and contempt and readies his tongue.

  She thinks: Don’t say it. You say too high for him, and he will feel his lowness.

  ‘Pretty in you,’ Will says. ‘And thus the once bailiff of Shit-on-the-wold conducts himself in his wisdom and dignity. But at least no stripped sow’s belly while you ply your fists, Father. May as well be, however.’ Anne loses him now. Will doesn’t look lost, though, looks right in the centre of his country. ‘But a drunken shoemaker boxing with his prentice is better than a man who pretends to be Lord Mayor presiding worshipful at the Guildhall and meanwhile he beats his youngest son, the one whose skin marks best, who’s not of a size to reply in kind, hey? I’m going back to London, certes I am, because it makes sense – to anyone but you. It’s naught to do with Edmund, and you’re a poor thing if you turn the blow on him you mean for me. Too much like me – is that it? And not enough like you? But that’s how it should be, sir.’ Will is almost coughing with passion. ‘Sons should not be like their fathers, and damned confusion on it if they are.’