The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Read online

  ‘It isn’t a matter of art,’ Kyd says helplessly.

  ‘No. No, I know.’ Oh, but it is. Everything is. Kyd weeps. Nashe sends out for a bottle. Will thinks of high green meadows, the fetching intricacy of woods.

  * * *

  They arrest Marlowe next, once they can find him. He is indeed staying with his patron Walsingham, the late tremendous Sir Francis’s cousin. Not a bad connection, when you have to go before the Privy Council. Kit will land on his feet, Nashe says. Will digs away at his new poem, Lucrece. Sir Proper Poet. Whether it’s the dark subject of his work, or the heat, he sleeps badly, interrupted by dreams that can’t quite be called nightmares – full of horrible images, but a glass between him and them: can’t touch.

  * * *

  At the Mermaid Will talks to Ben Jonson about it: seeking, perhaps, a sort of detachment. Compulsive follower of the theatre though he is, still he is a bricklayer, belonging to the other world, a daylight world. But if Will is hoping for comfort, he doesn’t get it.

  ‘Difficult for Kyd. Also for Marlowe. Difficult all round,’ Jonson says briskly. ‘So, the question is, what would you do in such a situation?’

  Will takes a long drink: to think. ‘I would never put myself in that situation in the first place.’

  Jonson laughs and drinks in turn. ‘You said that as if you meant it.’

  ‘Did I? That’s a habit I must rid myself of.’

  Of course, as Jonson’s bright, sceptical look says, it was no answer at all.

  * * *

  Marlowe: he bursts upon Will in Bishopsgate, as suddenly as if he has come up from a trapdoor. Clamps a hand on his neck.

  ‘What, Will? Don’t want to be seen with me, the infamous blasphemer? Never fear, you’re safe.’ He steps away, grinning. ‘Arm’s length, Will, arm’s length where you like to be.’

  It’s the smell that makes Will recoil. What must he have been drinking, to turn his breath like that?

  ‘You’re free? What happened?’

  ‘Free, we’re all free if we only hack the shackles from the mind. I like your Venus. I’ve been writing in that vein myself, on Hero and Leander. You must look it over and give me your opinion some time.’ The thought hits Will like a low branch in the face: Yes, outdoing me, I’ll wager. ‘Oh, I’m freed for now, but I have to present myself daily to the Privy Council. Show Mamma thy clean hands. Such shite and cockcheese, of course, that I would write those contemptible bills. Oh, mark you, I’m all for a massacre here and there – we weed fields, why not people? – but in truth the foreigners are hated because they are cleverer than poor English Toby Trot. And name me an emotion stronger than envy, hey?’

  ‘Jealousy.’

  ‘Say why.’

  ‘Jealousy has fear in it. Envy, compared, is just a kind of bunching of the muscles.’

  ‘Oh, well. It’s obvious you know whereof you speak.’ Marlowe stops to peer inquisitively, smile in dazzling, alarming place, into the faces of several passers-by. ‘God’s blood, the dead dull nullity of this town lately. Never mind the plague, you’d need the frogs and the locusts before this set would even begin to know they were alive. Look you, as I must make daily attendance on their lordships or worships or whoreships, I shall seize the opportunity to lay our case before them: when in pity’s name are they going to allow the playhouses open again? It’s a murderous intermission of the mind’s life. Scarce anyone’s heard my Faustus.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘And what did you think?’ For a moment Marlowe looks almost unsure, uncomfortable.

  ‘What everyone must think. It’s the most powerful thing yet written.’

  ‘Ah, everyone should think it, but only you and I know it.’ The detaining hand is back. ‘Now, if you had a bargain with the devil, Will, what would be your wish? Long life, perhaps? Solid prosperity for you and yours, or a woman or a man of such surpassing quality you forget everything—’

  ‘We’re back here, are we? Trying to get your fingers into my head.’

  ‘Where else?’ Marlowe says, with his peculiar two-voiced laugh.

  ‘Besides, how do you know I haven’t made a devil’s bargain already?’

  ‘How do I know?’ Marlowe releases him with a parting blast of that corrosive breath. ‘Well, I’m still here, aren’t I?’

  * * *

  Afterwards you feel something must have been forming in that fetid London air, that some inevitable result lay at the end, purposed, perhaps, like the shape of the fresh-coming play, as he turns over the pages of a stale and shapeless tale. Yet at the time it is life, middling mid-stream. The disturbances remain just that, in spite of the authorities’ alarm: no full-fledged riot bursts out from the apprentice musterings, no slaughter of the aliens, blood running in the streets. Another time, possibly. Plague lingers on; the pits fill. Any remaining libels are plucked down, shredded, burned. Kyd goes to ground, plainly just wanting to keep the eyes of the courts off him, the instruments off his limbs. The theatres stay closed, and with them the bear-baiting yards, so word goes round of private baitings laid on in closes and cellars illegally: folk will always find a way to be entertained. Actors go on tour where they can. Grass sprouts in the ground of the Theatre, where Will walks with Burbage, talking of and trying to conjure up the future: this is where he is when the news comes.

  ‘Well, the experiment of joining up the companies may after all be a prophecy,’ Burbage says, listlessly gnawing an apple. He is always trying to lose flesh. ‘Once the plague is over, we can’t scatter ourselves so wide again. Not that there will be enough of us left for that, I fancy. We can come out of it stronger, though. A good close company of sharers, all seasoned actors, all committed to the hilt…’

  Suddenly his brother Cuthbert is there, panting, giant belly wobbling: Burbage’s terrible example. No actor, but manager, moneyer, fixer: and always the first with news. ‘Did you hear? Marlowe’s dead.’

  Some kind of sound comes out of Will’s mouth. Mostly gasp. But as for the word: is it how or is it who?

  * * *

  They piece it together, as much as they can. Will, Nashe, a few others who knew Marlowe. He proves to have had, in the usual way of the dead, not that many friends.

  And it seems like another of those typical Marlowe encounters, those violent eddies that follow him around. He was with a party of men at a house in Deptford. They were supplied by the dame of the house with food and drink, probably a lot of that. What men? Strangers, known to him? Known to him, presumably – but with Marlowe, who knows? A quarrel broke out. Nashe, who goes quietly down to Deptford to ask around, believes it was over the bill. Or it may have begun with that, and escalated. The trouble is, they have already buried him there, and now rumour is the only loud sound to be heard; and that is more hollow than ever, with Marlowe’s reputation so dubious even before this happened. Someone saw a body taken away and thought it was a plague victim. A prostitute who knew the neighbourhood said it was a matter of buggers, and Deptford, with its dockyard and sailors, was known for buggers, and buggers often came to blows over other buggers. A dagger was drawn, somehow, and however it began it ended with the dagger piercing and so ending Christopher Marlowe’s brain, and so ended other things, many other things.

  * * *

  The Earl of Southampton is being measured for a new suit of clothes. Will reads to him while the crouching tailors circumnavigate his body: the opening of his new poem The Rape of Lucrece.

  ‘A more solemn strain, this. As befits, I dare say.’ Southampton extends his arms: tape measures record his symmetrical perfection. ‘But you besides. Something’s in you. What happened? You’re not here.’

  ‘There’s no hiding anything from you, my lord.’

  ‘Oh, come, you don’t have to do that any more,’ the earl says irritably. But he senses, perhaps, that Will is hiding behind it: the role, humble servant to patron. He dismisses the tailors. ‘I would say someone died, if you were wearing black.’

  ‘Someone did die.’

>   ‘My God, tell. What is it? Can you not say in what regard you knew this person? A friend, something more?’

  ‘Friend? In a way. A rival. He was – he was the same age as me.’ He sees interest wane a little in Southampton’s eyes: oh, a mummy near thirty. ‘And now – this is the curious thing I keep dwelling on – I shall always be older than him.’

  Suddenly a twitch and flash: of course the earl knows his theatre. ‘Oh, you don’t mean—’

  ‘I don’t mean anything,’ Will says, as respectfully as he can. ‘Certainly not to be such dull company. May I read more?’

  For what can he say? That more than once, struggling, aspiring, feeling the clogs of his aspiration, he has wished Marlowe dead? Because, after all, no flight of the imagination can make that his fault. It’s just a thing inside. It’s a thing to add to the hundred pounds that Southampton has ordered his steward to have made over to Will when this stay is over, a thing to add to the shadow of apprehension as he becomes more fabulously himself – that luck like this must be paid for.

  * * *

  Ben: when the burning sensation came on in his breeches, he thought about Providence.

  His relationship with God was a complex one, underlined by a single simplicity: he felt that in the author of the universe he would find, for once, his intellectual superior. He was not inclined therefore to quarrel with whatever Providence pointed out to him, as long as it were bold enough. He liked complexity, as testing to the brain, but he disliked ambiguity: it was where falsehood could smuggle in. So when he resumed playgoing, along with eager audiences, in the long-awaited reopening of ’94; and heard Juliet dying in beautiful ecstasy, that was him – split. Such poetry: hearing each line was like having a petal plucked from the stem of your soul; but was this right, to sink yourself into such beauty? To lose yourself, in fact? He didn’t know: faced with this, he didn’t know how he felt, and that was his quarrel with it. He was directed to too many feelings without being told which was the true way to go.

  So, with this illness: Providence was rewarding or reproving him for the lechery, which, unthinkingly, he had lapsed into along with the plays. He did wish he had someone he might talk to about it: where to find a surgeon who could help, was the treatment as unpleasant as they said. There were friends, among the playgoers. There was Will Shakespeare with whom he could say he had a friendship born out of admiration, nurtured by a mutual love of words, belonging to the special arena where they met, the theatre edges, taverns, bookstalls. He flattered himself that Shakespeare, who was not reputed one of the debauchers of the theatre, always made an exception with him, staying late over drink and talk. Never over-indulgent, though: he had a peculiar look of costive pain when he had had enough. So far from the repute of Marlowe, whose passing Ben saluted with a short sigh. People died.

  Couldn’t talk to Shakespeare about this, though. Served him right, perhaps. If it were the worst sort of dose, he might end up with his nose falling off, or go to an early grave. He wondered about that: did not fancy it, in spite of his own resolution to kill himself if he could not escape bricklaying. He must have a greater appetite for life than he supposed. Life at any price? Perhaps not, but life, God, yes, life was a sweet donation, close on the pulses, streaming with the sun and sharp, like winter cold or the barber’s trimming scissors laid intimately against the soft part of your neck. Sweet Jesus, let me live; and if it be the Lord’s will, prevent my member turning black and my nose falling off.

  He went to a doctor in Westminster, but the man talked such appalling dog-Latin that Ben gave him up. On impulse he tried instead an old woman who sold nostrums from a booth at the south end of London Bridge. She got him to piss in a pail, sniffed, dipped. A disorder of the bladder, she said. She purged him, told him to live clean and sober for a fortnight. It worked. He went back to thank her, but her booth had gone, she had been moved on, arrested perhaps by Puritan city fathers. He drank to her and resolved to learn his lesson, and then – here he suspected the intervention of Providence – he saw Agnes.

  It was at the theatre – and, again, miraculous or providential that he turned his eyes from the stage to see her, for this was no run-of-the-mill performance. There were only two major companies left to attract the spectator of discernment: the Admiral’s Men at Henslowe’s Rose, with Alleyn at front, and this troupe, the Chamberlain’s Men, newly constituted, Burbage in the chief roles, Will Kempe in clown parts and better, Jonson thought, than Tarlton ever was, with Will Shakespeare in secondary parts. And writing for them, writing pieces like this (Romeo – yes, in spite of everything, he was there again, for there had been nothing like it, and nothing like this grip and hush). This was the company to watch, with such a genius, untutored and undisciplined though he might be. Night’s candles are burnt out and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops … And Burbage was more natural than Alleyn, who almost sang instead of speaking his verse sometimes, and the Admiral’s Men were still relying on their staple of Marlowe; and though Faustus and The Jew were still drawing there would be no more from that source. No, this was the place to be for – for what? The aspirant? Was that when it began? Years before, perhaps, the mind in long readiness, poised to leap. But first, yes, there was the heart to be dealt with: call it that.

  Agnes: in one of the balconies, her old gorgon at her side. But, great heaven, changed. Thin, pale, the splendid buxomness almost gone. Green-sickness? Surely too old for that.

  Ben-sickness. He found it out, bit by bit. He approached when the Nurse was on, doing one of her comic monologues; he would dispense with that if the piece were his – it spoiled the unity; a tragedy shouldn’t have comedy in it. Art wasn’t life, as he was trying to explain to Will the other evening; art was rescue of order from the messy wreck of life … At first she would have nothing to do with him. Actually set her face away, refused to open her mouth. When he persisted she got up and left. The old dragon wagged a finger at him. ‘You’re the start of it all,’ she whined. ‘The way she’s been. Oh, the way she’s been.’

  He was admitted at last to her house. The old uncle couldn’t remember him, or couldn’t remember forgetting him. My dear sir, let me show you my collections … Finally he managed to be alone with Agnes. The way she’d been: well, he was human, he couldn’t help but be a little flattered in between being shocked, saddened, ashamed. When he broke with her, she had not picked herself briskly up and carried on, as he had supposed. She was wretched. She loathed herself, she thought she would never be happy again, she even took to drinking sweet wine in the mornings. And then a draper from St Mary Axe wanted to marry her and she said yes, though she didn’t care for him, but she wanted to get her own back at Ben. Bastard, bastard. All this she told him in her direct, guttural way, in between crying into her apron and glaring hate at him through eyes made enmazing with soft tears on violet. He was already hers then, probably, even before she wailed, slapping out at him, that she had loved him consumedly, the draper had been nothing, worse than nothing, but at least he had not walked out on her.

  ‘But after he had got some kisses,’ she made a face at the memory of them, ha, not like mine Ben wagered to himself, ‘he would fall asleep by the fire and snore, and wake up shivering and bid me stir it for he was prone to chills. And I would do it, God help me, and he would say, “Prettily done, thou art a good child…”’ She was not laughing, not quite able, not yet; and also it was serious, he could see that, and he was serious, too, at that moment. Serious with himself for making her so unhappy, and for throwing away something so valuable, someone who loved him so much. Though he thought well of himself, he had to be honest, it seemed unlikely he would inspire such love again. So he said: ‘The man was a wretch. But where is he? He cannot have left you. That is reserved for fools like me.’

  ‘No, it was me. I wanted no more to do with him because…’ She looked her miserable loving fury: almost about to hit him.

  ‘Stir the fire, says he? For you a man should be ready to thrust his hand in the
fire, for a prize like you, idiot that I was to throw it away. Sweet Agnes, he should have been ready as I am, thus—’ He did it. It didn’t hurt as much as he had thought it might; at least, not just then.

  ‘Oh, you great fool,’ she cried, as he cradled his red trotter. ‘Do you think that’s what a woman wants?’ She fetched butter, smoothed it on.

  ‘Tell me, tell me what a woman wants,’ he said, ‘but no, not a woman, the woman, the only woman…’ They had been at Romeo and Juliet, and the intense was in the air, perhaps. Also it was abominable for her to be thin and pale over him. The simple transactions of love could cure it, like the crone’s purge, and they were not expensive. It made sense. And her kiss was as bewitching as ever, though he was a little light-headed from pain.

  The old mad uncle would have let them live there when they were married, but she wanted to be away from him and the mouldering tapestries. They began housekeeping in Westminster. Ben had found half a house to rent, not far from Hartshorn Lane. Bed was delightful, and he looked forward to having children to bring up in the right way. She started trying to change him within about a month. She didn’t like his drinking, sleeping it off, and rising to study: how was she to fit into that? He shrugged: she wasn’t meant to, really. She was impressed at first by the new strength of his theatrical connections, the way he could count on a reception from several of the actors, above all from Master Shakespeare, the poet of tender enchantment who had made Romeo – that was remarkable. Alas, ammunition too. Would the man who made Romeo snore so, leave his clothes about?

  ‘You had better ask his wife, my love,’ Ben said. ‘She is in Warwickshire where he comes from, and she never sees him from one quarter-day to the next.’ It quietened her for a while. Not for long. Sometimes if he was really tired of it he would stump over to his stepfather’s house and sleep a night there. ‘They’re all shrews, more or less,’ his stepfather said. Ben only grunted. He didn’t like it coming from him, for it was an aspersion on his mother, whom he had long considered the womanly exception; but a sort of truth in it, he had to admit.