The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Read online

  ‘Well.’ She shrugged. ‘You’ve always known yourself.’

  ‘God. Never mind me. We’re not speaking of me. You, Anne, and yours, think of them, work for them. Me – I’ve got nothing to lose.’ And he walked on with the dog-grin of the boozer, fathomlessly unhappy, burying his reasons in caves you could never reach.

  * * *

  When the burly young man accosts him on the threshold of Field’s shop, Will’s first thought is that this is a debt-collector of some kind; that he is going to march him off to gaol. He is not aware of any debts, but this does seem to happen to everyone in his profession, so he is not wholly surprised.

  And even when the young man says, thrusting a big square hand into his, ‘Master Shakespeare, I have so long wanted to meet you that there’s no further help for it. I admire your work so, I must risk displeasing you in telling you it like this,’ even then, Will feels he has been somehow taken into custody.

  ‘Sir, there is no displeasure, you are very good.’ Will sees that the young man has his Venus and Adonis, unbound, under his arm.

  Emboldened – though he doesn’t look as if he needs much emboldening – the young man goes on: ‘I swear to you before God that you have it in you to be the greatest poet of our time. This, sir, without purpose. I know the world. You suppose such praise seeks a reward. I speak purely as a scholar, a lover of the word; I speak as one who learned at the feet of William Camden and can still count him as a friend. I speak as one who knows the originals, the Metamorphoses and Amores and the Georgics, that have gone into this.’ He pats the book. ‘And I have read nothing in English to compare to it. Oh, to be sure, it has a hundred faults, and not a few absurdities.’ This with a broad smile, as if it were the most complimentary thing said yet.

  ‘So few as a hundred?’

  ‘I’ve seen your plays. Then came this, and I marked the printer, and asked about, and they said you could often be found here. Now, you’ll meet a deal of foolish critics who don’t know what they’re talking about, so it must be to your good to meet one with knowledge to add to taste.’ Jacqueline Field passes through the shop, with a troubled glance as if afraid these two are about to square up to each other. The young man dips her a bow, then seems to come for the first time to self-consciousness. ‘Master Shakespeare, all I ask is that you don’t judge me’ – a proud gesture at his plain dress – ‘by how I appear.’

  Will smiles. ‘Certainly: and don’t you either.’

  And after that there is nothing to do but either say thanks, goodbye; or propose adjourning somewhere for a drink. Doing the latter, Will makes the acquaintance of Ben Jonson.

  He chooses the Mermaid, thinking he might fit in some business, for the Burbages and Henslowe are often there. Then he wonders if the place might be above Jonson’s touch; and he wonders whether secretly he wants it to be, whether he wants to show off his eminence to a young acolyte … But doesn’t this man have the air of a real Londoner, more at ease, more unimpressible than he can ever be? Already Ben Jonson is someone who makes Will ask questions of himself. Odd that he doesn’t run a mile from him.

  ‘So, tell: how did you do it?’ It is soon apparent that Ben Jonson is not averse to talking about himself: by the second mug of ale he has given Will his good ancestry, Westminster School, William Camden, soldiering in the Low Countries, and what he modestly mentions is only a touch of his wide learning. But he is even more eager to pluck it out of Will: everything – his life, his mind, his theatre. Will is well schooled in not giving of himself, so doesn’t fear. Besides, with this man he doesn’t mind it so much. His curiosity is a refreshing blast, like the hand-pump which it looks as if he washes his rough curly head under.

  ‘How did I do what?’

  ‘All of it. Plain Warwickshire man, you tell me. Yet you’ve turned out plays that tickle the general, and you’ve written to standards of the most exacting taste likewise. All this and being a player. Does the player part help? They say Marlowe disdains the theatre.’

  ‘He appears to. I don’t know where appearance ends and the real begins.’

  ‘In Marlowe? You mean he poses?’

  ‘In anybody. As for playing – it’s a craft. Play-making is a craft likewise. You learn it in the doing, what hangs together, what falls apart.’

  Jonson looks sceptical, even a little suspicious, as if at an unworthy joke.

  ‘As for the rest … Well, there you are with my book in your hands. You’ve been candid enough to tell me you are engaged in a trade that you don’t care for—’

  ‘Oh, you needn’t be courtly gentle with me. My labour is loathsome, aye, but I get a little money by it, and that money I lay out on the richest food of all, the food of the mind.’

  Will nods. ‘Then you’ve answered your own question. Love will always do it. By love I mean choosing. I chose this, and everything that goes with it…’ He feels the nascent pain in the forehead, which means, one out of three times, a long, crushing megrim. ‘For what you need, you find a way. Now Richard Field luckily is my old friend, and his shop is the field, indeed, where I range and graze. If you would crop up a little French, a little Italian—’

  ‘And this on top of a mere country grammar-school? You’ve done well, assuredly,’ Jonson smiles, ‘when what you have can with justice be called a smattering.’

  ‘They were wrong, you know. Whoever said this arrogance was charming.’ Though he knows where he stands with this man as he does not with Marlowe or even Nashe.

  Jonson flushes – just a little. ‘Arrogance is naught but strength of mind running ahead of itself. I assure you, Master Shakespeare, with you I am being humble, as humble as I have ever been. And in that spirit let me ask you, at what age do you think a man should marry?’

  An unlikely clairvoyant. Will rubs his temples. The headache is still making up its mind. ‘You expect fine figures, a couplet? I can only answer dull. An age when he is able to support a wife.’

  ‘So, so. But this answer is various. Feed her on bread, or clothe her in silks?’

  ‘You – he must learn her ways first.’

  Jonson considers. ‘Well, that’s not so hard. There are only a few types of people after all. Local variations of temper, of disposition, aye, but they’re only the spots on the throstle’s breast, and we still know it from a blackbird.’

  ‘No,’ says Will, jolted, ‘there is a world in every feather. And a universe in the spaces between.’

  ‘Hm. But you can’t think like that, for you’d linger over the shape of every pebble and quibble over every word, and you’d end up mad. When’ – Jonson asks this almost incidentally, wiping alefroth from his lips – ‘when are you going to reform the drama?’

  Will feels stiff and reluctant, like a strongbox lid eased open. ‘A vast subject. I don’t think beyond the plague ending and the theatres reopening.’

  ‘You should.’

  ‘I can hardly say how much I dislike being told you should in that way, Master Jonson.’

  ‘Oh, but let’s put that aside,’ Jonson says, shrugging: you can tell that your feelings will never come in for a great deal of attention from him. ‘Let’s consider the essential question: why do you write for the stage, after all?’

  Will says, promptly: ‘Because it pays.’

  They laugh. The kind of easy, parallel laugh that declares friendship. Though Will is not sure they are laughing about the same thing.

  * * *

  A late parting. God, they have ranged. A remarkable young fellow, Jonson, a brain he can use like a thumping arquebus or a lancing needle. Will only hopes – well, he doesn’t know what he hopes. The headache fades as he climbs the narrow stairs of his lodging, the chandler’s fat, yeasty-voiced wife calling after him, does he lack aught? Nothing. Just this. Open the door. The careful, artful space, clothes, the table devoted to paper and ink, part-scrolls, books, books. A mirror covered over. He greets the room with a lover’s sigh: ah.

  * * *

  Ben would willingly have stayed tal
king all night. He didn’t regret introducing himself, not that he ever regretted much. Shakespeare, player and play-maker and promising poet: well, it had not been a disappointment. There was a man for you – no doubleness. Remarkable humility. Having none himself, Ben knew how to admire it in others, though he still believed that, like wearing green, it did not suit everybody. As was his habit, he swallowed a last draught and heel of bread before bed, slept and sweated it out, and rose early to read.

  To write a little also. He had resumed it for the first time since Master Camden had guided him through Latin verses. English now: you had to adjust yourself. Fewer rules, which perturbed him. It occurred to him as morning nosed over his page that he had not waited on his lady for a few days.

  He found Agnes in, he thought, crabbed mood; but that was women, they held no sway over their own selves. Ignoring it, he told her of his purchase of Venus and Adonis, of approaching Shakespeare’s narrow back at the door of Field’s shop.

  ‘We might read it a little together. It has already earned a reputation as a warm piece, you know, and some citizen-husbands are warning their wives against reading it, lest it – I wonder what? Excite appetites they cannot satisfy?’

  She was not much inclined to laughter today. Oh, well: he did not founder into silence, for he could entertain himself with his own conversation while Madam sulked. At last she stirred and mantled, and out with it: ‘Do you mean you laid out all the ready money you have on that book?’

  Such an unaccountable question: all he could do was offer information. ‘Books are not cheap, honey. Nor should they be.’

  Agnes began marching about the room, skirts swinging, jaw set. He watched with curiosity. Women: all that energy, you could turn a spit or grind corn with it, and they used it for nothing. ‘You said you would begin saving against a place for us to live,’ she said at last. ‘I shan’t live at home, Ben, as a bride, nor with your people neither. And if you are to dispose of your money so…’ Suddenly he found a peep-hole through the wall of incomprehension: she was reproaching him. A kind of light, giddy apprehension came over him: was she turning into a shrew, even before they were married? So he put it into words, those words: half laughing.

  ‘Oh. Oh, you should take shame to yourself for speaking so,’ she cried, stamping. Tears leaking too. Absurd, when she was as strong as a youth, this little-girl business. Time to be clear.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘don’t, I entreat, use me like some underfoot, downtrod husband-worm, my lady, for I won’t abide it. I do, you see, as I please.’

  She looked at him through her tears, and he noted the effectiveness of that – as, no doubt, she had. ‘And not ever what would please me? What do you mean? Is this the way of it, Benjamin, for our marriage? What do you mean?’

  ‘A fart for thee.’ His liberated tongue was quick. ‘Truly, sweetling, if art a shrew o’ this kind, then I want thee no more. A fart for thee in parting, and a shitten pot on our marriage, the no-marriage, the no-marriage from which sweet heaven has preserved me.’

  And he was off, with feelings like cool breezes of relief. If that was the way, then that was the way: Ben liked nothing better than an absence of alternatives.

  And it was odd how when a heavy drunk burbling man got in his way at the corner of Thames Street, Ben knocked him down and yelled foulness, yelled as if he knew him and had been mortally offended by him and wanted to grind his blubbering face into the fishheads. Where had that come from? Well, never mind. Not everything had to have a reason, damn it. His mother was curiously irritating when he got home as well, tiptoeing round him as if he were his stepfather.

  * * *

  Violence. This charge in the air. It begins perhaps with the plague as the finishing touch; winter hasn’t killed it and now with the muggy spring it’s coming back in force. Add the new corpses, the new fear to the toppling heap of distresses, the prices and shortages, soldiers returning from the dragging fighting that the Armada victory was supposed to finish, everything edgy and not right and – look. The strangers among us.

  They’ve been coming for years, fleeing religious persecution, usually, Protestants from France and the Low Countries (ah, but are they always, how can you tell?), bringing their trades, thriving. How much they stand out varies. Often you don’t notice them. But at times like this they are conspicuous, and damn it if there don’t seem more of them, and thriving altogether too much. That is, where they don’t thrive at all, where they pile ten into a room and because they don’t mind living in filth they push up the rents for those who do. Too rich, too poor. So many of them. So few of them, and yet look how influential. It begins with changing minds. Now those Frenchies on the corner who you’ve always said are not so bad, you begin to wonder … It begins with glances at odd items of costume, broad breeches, deep hood – mind, if they don’t wear odd costume it’s even more troubling, for then they’re trying to pass as English. And it continues with prentices gathering together on half-holidays, chanting dirty rhymes, making little resolutions. Libels. Printed sheets passed from hand to hand or, more daringly – for the authorities are on the watch against all these demonstrations – pasted prominently up. Printed words come to the aid of this swelling inchoate thing, giving it rule and shape. Rhythm. It continues with here and there a little manifestation. The dead animal left on the Huguenot family’s doorstep, the Flemish weaver finding his window smashed. Prentices stamping and clapping and linking arms to sweep down the street in the areas where they live, like Southwark, East Smithfield, St Martin-le-grand. Which is where it begins for Will.

  He has been stalking books in St Paul’s Churchyard, though a poor day’s hunt, and is thinking besides of a new narrative poem now that Venus is out and the Earl of Southampton has accepted his dedication. He has sent Will also a gracious note and a promise, this is not all, come to Southampton House next quarter, so things in the offing but a feeling of not yet, and now Venus is seen through the press I should go home surely, for a space at least, but not yet. What’s keeping me in London when pullulating plague places its heavy lock on the playhouse doors and lays its bar across my future? God knows where I should be.

  Out of sorts also from supping last night with Richard and Jacqueline Field. Of course he must think of her by that name and not, which she hasn’t been for ages, Madame Vautrollier. Yet so she is still in your memories and those irresponsible dreams you would pluck out if they were splinters in the flesh. But they occur as they please: the mind is not our own. The soul is borrowed of God, they say, but what then of the mind, when it moves in ways we don’t control, who does that belong to, when it turns loose in dreams or drink, like the fairies turning the milk and plaiting manes? Madame Vautrollier, no, Jacqueline, has a way of leaving a great deal of space around him at table, after supper when they have the lute, or he reads aloud, making a physical detour as if he is a great fat man, a man obtruding into her life-space. He turns down another alley off St Martin-le-grand, frowns at the dense crowd. What Jacqueline seems to be saying: noli me tangere, touch me not, for Caesar’s I am. But not of herself: of him. Is that me? Not to be touched?

  It dawns on him that the crowd is not a fortuitous one but a gathering. Prentices again. Kicking a bladder, shoving and shouting. The young in a mass. Instinctively he hates it, though he plays on it, of course, when he acts and when he writes, get them all in a net, thinking and feeling as one. Terribly, wolfishly handsome, the young: their profuse hair, strong teeth, beautiful shallow eyes. Some men with them, though, old enough to know better. They have some broadsheets, he sees, and they are pressing them on people – one on him. Crudely copied, smeared, stale stuff about the foreigners among us: he barely glances, throws it down. But finds he is being assessed for that.

  It begins like most of these things, in messy confusion. The prentices jostle and trip an old man – was it intended, an accident? Hard to tell, but they give him a good look over as he struggles up unaided among them, put their faces close to his (face grows to face). ‘You ought t
o leave an honest Englishman be,’ he cries, lusty-voiced and accusing. ‘I’m one of the last hereabouts, it’s naught but those fuckers in every house. I’ve watched them come and crowd us out one by one.’ They like that. Victim to victor. Will was all ready to go to the old man’s aid. He turns. ‘And there’s one for you.’

  A woman, stepping out of a porched doorway, looking up at the overcast sky, putting hands to her hood, shaking out her skirts, doing all the little things we’re allowed, that drive the prentices to fury. She does look somehow foreign, meaning she draws a second glance.

  Will moves with them. But not with them, never with any group; he feels uneasy if his stride happens to fall into step with another’s, like with Southampton one day after hawking, when they went on a walk about the estate … They make a ring around her, leaving a space, roughly the space of another body. Noli me tangere. And she does what Will can see and sense is the very worst thing at this moment: she hardly notices them.

  ‘Hoy!’ One young brute edges into the space, seeming half afraid of himself. ‘Madam French, are you?’

  Occupied with fitting her gloves neatly to her fingers, she frowns up, shakes her head, wants to go past them. Youngish, rather than young, dark, slight. Will struggles through them, with a flash of memory: his hands burning. Afraid for her because again she is doing the worst thing, just being dismissive of them, of their surge and bristle. They start to chant – unison voices, the surrender of the human: ‘Madam French, Madam French…’

  ‘What? Yes, I came from France, what then?’

  No accent at all that he can hear, unless a certain crispness of utterance, like Jacqueline. Now she is really looking at them and, dear God, they hate that too, for instead of glancing over a nuisance like a puddle in the street her turning eyes take them in, contemptuously. ‘Yes, messieurs?’

  Will is already pushing through, hand on sword-hilt. Brave of her, or mad. Or furious: he reads it in her look, I thought men not rats … They’re not going to let her go. When she makes a brisk, exasperated stalk forward they don’t touch her – they just rearrange their insensate selves, a shuffling, staring dance, blocking her way.