The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Read online

  ‘I needn’t take it home,’ he said, loud and urgent, as if she were already far off. ‘If you wish, I could – I could bury it somewhere.’

  ‘What would you tell Master Shakespeare?’

  ‘Say I looked over the carcass, and it was fit for nothing.’

  ‘And then what of the money you have given over?’ She shook her head. ‘Besides, I wouldn’t force you to lie to your father.’

  He nearly said: ‘My father is made of lies.’ But in fact he could say nothing. Words had flown out from him and done their work, like the hawk flying to the kill from the falconer’s wrist. Now the hood was back on. Now Mistress Hathaway was restored and queenly, and Will was reduced again to the unsatisfactory flesh and bowing low as she left him.

  She said softly: ‘Thank you.’

  He imagined her thinking: No one saw it, no one saw me. Only a youth. No one saw.

  * * *

  Benjamin. The name often given to the son of an older father. Child of my age.

  But why, Ben sometimes asked of his dead father’s shade, just why did you leave it so long? Why did your loins not stir with the making of me when you were young? Then you might have seen me grow – seen me born at least – instead of going to your grave when I had yet a month in the womb.

  And, above all, I might not have had a stepfather.

  It was on an evening of hot storm over Westminster, in his eighth year, that he first learned about the business of loins stirring, and what came of it. At that time he went whenever he could to the little parish school in St Martin’s Lane. On this particular day, with his stepfather in the beating mood, Ben decided when the clerk clanged the bell that he would not go home. One of his schoolfellows, seeing him loitering, said Ben could come home with him. So instead of darting across the spattering Strand, between cattle and cartwheels, he followed his friend into a warren of courts and alleys behind St Martin’s. The boy said his parents wouldn’t be there – his father was a barber, his mother a cow-keeper – but his sister, he added with a special look, would be home. Ben could see his sister.

  In an upstairs room above a stable, Ben saw. The girl was about fifteen, swart, big-breasted, simple. She giggled over the shoulder of the man who, Ben thought at first, was trying somehow to kill her by smothering her while half naked. The man didn’t seem to mind the boys watching. He winked and commented on the progress of the work. When he was done he fastened his breeches, saw Ben’s bewilderment, and gave him a brief explanation.

  Ah. So when, Ben asked, would the baby come? The man laughed. Never, with any luck: he believed the mother knew her business and dosed the girl. Before he left, the man threw a farthing on the floor. It rolled. Giggling, the girl chased it down.

  It was grim, but it was knowledge, therefore precious. And it even helped him understand the mystery of his stepfather. To whom, of course, he still had to go home that night, and who beat him all the harder for being late.

  When the man had gone to the tavern, Ben came out with it: why?

  ‘Why do I have to have a stepfather at all?’

  His mother looked at him, considering. Her eyes were large and mild but the rest of her features sharp: sometimes she looked like two people at once. She seemed to decide that Ben was a child who could be told hard things. ‘Because of money, Benjamin. When your father died, he left us with no money.’

  ‘Why? Did he spend it all?’

  ‘None to spend. A minister’s living dies with him, and he had no estate. Oh, once he did, but it was lost in Queen Mary’s time. She brought back the Romish rites, but the Jonsons would not conform to them. For a time your father even lay in prison.’

  ‘Good,’ Ben said. ‘To go to prison for what you believe.’

  ‘So say I,’ his mother said, after a silent, still moment. ‘But that was why we needed money when he died. More than I could earn with my needle. A woman cannot shift for herself in this world, Benjamin, save she be bred up to it. Even then, it’s hard to make your way unprotected. For my sake and yours, I had to marry again. Not because I longed for linen sheets instead of hempen. No. To keep us safe.’

  And Ben understood. So far, and no further. Marrying again, very well. Marrying him – marrying Robert ham-fist brick-dust dull-wit Brett, not so well.

  Once when his stepfather tired himself out plying the strap and sat down to yawn and rub his arm muscles, Ben said: ‘As soon as I’m big enough, I shall hit you back, you know.’

  His stepfather grinned. ‘That day’s not yet.’

  ‘It will come, though.’

  His stepfather shrugged. He was a heavy, full-lipped man with colourless eyes. ‘It will come, aye. The same with our death, boy. Same with our death.’

  Not mine, Ben thought. He intended living for ever, and could not imagine anyone living with any other aim.

  What he saw in the room above the stables gave him firmer ideas about many things. His mother was a stronger woman than that poor idiot creature: still, she was a woman. Ben watched when his stepfather was in loving vein and she turned small in his embrace, offering him little kissing troubles. ‘Poor chick, how dost?’ he cooed. ‘Thou hast a world of grief on thy pretty brow tonight. Wilt let me love it away, hey?’ The back of his neck formed two precise rolls of flesh, like some pastry-cook’s confection. Ben watched his mother’s fingers caress them.

  Hempen sheets or linen, it didn’t matter.

  So he turned to the next page of the Bible. He was not devout – except about reading, and this was the only book in the house. Books were precious and expensive. The parish clerk kept his locked up in a trunk in the schoolroom. Ben might have had one to borrow – but you had to get the clerk’s favour, usually extended to delicate, sweet boys, and Ben was plain. One day, he assured himself, he would have books. He would live among them night and day. It was all his desire. And though the clerk did not like his looks, he admitted that Ben was the best scholar he had ever taught.

  And there Ben hungered for his future, beyond this dense drab slice of Westminster, where brew-houses smoked and fishmongers kept their heads down over the bloody slab. Hereabouts, his stepfather stood pretty high, being a master bricklayer. Beyond Charing Cross, where blaring London rose, lords and rich citizens alike were putting up houses in new, luxurious brick, and Robert Brett was busy in their service. He had an apprentice. The last had turned out bad, run off, become a handler of stolen goods, and ended up hanged; but the new one promised well, took his beatings, and would surely become a master himself when his seven years were out.

  And after that, of course, there was a natural successor in the family.

  Never – please, God, never. Ben had to make good his escape. Learning, learning, learning. He urged himself on. And the winter after he saw the empty giggling girl, grace descended. The clerk came home with him to see his mother, when his stepfather was at work.

  ‘Westminster School?’

  ‘Madam, you must have thought of it. To speak truth, he knows everything I do. And there is nowhere superior in the kingdom. My lord Burghley oversees it; the Queen has a special care for it. You cannot do better by him.’

  Ben sat quiet. Neither looked at him: the clerk because he found him unattractive, his mother because she was not thinking of him but of someone else.

  ‘The cost,’ she said.

  ‘Being so near, you have an advantage. He can live at home instead of boarding. Yes, you will have to find him in writing-gear and books and candles. It is an expense, but surely a worthy one. And after a year, he’s eligible for a scholarship.’ The clerk sniffed. ‘It would make a vast difference to his prospects, madam. Even the universities might lie at the end of it.’

  His mother sat and thought. Ben slipped away, to be sick in a corner of the yard, sick with wanting.

  He was not quite sure how his mother did it. When she first told him he was to go to Westminster School, she said that a clerical connection of his dead father’s had provided the funds, in his memory. Certainly his stepfathe
r would not have spared the money. He shook his head over the scheme; could not see the use in it. But, then, he could not see the use in Ben at all – until he was of prentice age.

  As for his mother, Ben thought: I can forgive her anything, for this.

  Now the world begins. Such was the solemnity with which Ben first entered the long schoolroom. It was crowded and noisy and stank to the rafters, and he was down among the lowliest, the Oppidans, local-dwelling day boys, conscious of his rough shoes and frayed bands; and the headmaster lashed and thrashed. But he knew he was going to enjoy everything. Latin he already loved: now came stranger Greek to baffle and beguile.

  ‘Many boys find Greek difficult at first.’ Master Camden smiled. ‘But I’ve never known any find the difficulty gratifying before.’

  With William Camden, the undermaster, perfect understanding and even intimacy. Nothing of the parish clerk: he was a long-nosed, abstracted young man, whose brown eyes were untreacherous and without desire. Patiently he supervised forty Queen’s Scholars in their noisome dormitory before retiring to his chamber above and studying until dawn put out his taper.

  ‘The history of ourselves.’ That was his passion. ‘Britain, land and legend and truth. The Romans walked here, Benjamin, and many a farmer turns up their coins with his plough; and there are in our western shires giant circles of stones put up by human hands of which we know nothing. The ancients took pride in their history, and we still learn from them. Perhaps we in turn may be a pattern to future ages. So my studies. I’m not so vain as to think they matter now. But if I can lay a small stone in the path of posterity—’

  ‘I want to do the same,’ Ben burst out.

  Master Camden smiled again. ‘Well, now, leave me my scholar’s field, at least.’

  ‘Not the same. I don’t mean that. What I want—’ Could he say it? Yes, to this man he could; this man obliterated all thought of the whistling strap and the fat neck. ‘I want to be the most learned man in the kingdom.’

  And Master Camden paused only a moment, eyebrows up, before nodding. ‘A commendable aim. But what is it you would seek to do with your learning?’

  Ben ran his eyes over his schoolfellows: the stupid talking loudly, the ugly mocking themselves to make the handsome laugh. Alliances and need. He heard a farthing rolling on floorboards.

  ‘Make people better,’ he said.

  2

  The Malcontent (1582)

  ‘Now I’m alive again,’ Will says, turning the pages. He does not want to laugh or to cry, not exactly: he feels on the edge of some third expression, surpassing either of them.

  They are in the bare, swept, godly parlour of the Field house, a little drunk but not as drunk as they mean to be. Will has supped here and now godly, black-clad Master and Mistress Field have gone, climbing the stairs to their unthinkable bed, cautioning about candles, leaving them to it. Allowing that Will and Richard still have much to talk of.

  Schoolfriends, they have been separated these three years since Richard went to London as a printer’s apprentice. His master is taking a cure in the country and has given Richard a fortnight’s indulgence. At supper they drank small beer, but Richard has a secreted bottle of something fine from London, on the table now alongside his very different treasure.

  ‘I would have brought more.’ Richard is smallish and dark and compact, little different from when they were at school. As if he has made a decision about growing. Will’s knees graze on church pews, and nothing fits him. ‘But I could only carry so much in my pack. Now, that one’s faint, the whole batch of ink turned villainous – we thought of selling it but there’s reputation, you know. That one hung on our hands. It’s pretty but no one bought. That one, I don’t know what happened. There was a sort of ripple when it was pressed, and so you have to fill in the words in the middle of every line. It’s—’

  ‘That’s what I’m doing,’ says Will, greedy, abstracted: rude as a child. A princely gift, these loose sheets from the printer’s workshop, spoiled or unsold. A Jest for Prentices. Rough, deckle-edged paper, as communicative to the touch as skin. Will has read everything in Stratford: all the books borrowed of the schoolmaster, ballads and broadsides bought on fair-days. The Mirror of True Repentance. The paper smells, he fancies, of London, dense and hot. The Play of the Pardoner. He looks up, dizzy. ‘Your master prints plays?’

  ‘Some few. He esteems them trash for the most part. Now try this wine. Madame Vautrollier made me a present of it.’

  ‘Oho.’

  ‘Not oho. No oho about it.’ Richard pours: the liquid pearls bobble. ‘Mind, she is a magnificent creature. Your Frenchwoman, Will, is a different breed altogether – the way she carries herself … Savour it, man, don’t swallow it down.’

  ‘Latin.’ Will is still turning pages, wading in and out of the stream of words. ‘Damn, I’m rusty. What case is that?’

  ‘Ablative.’ Richard coughs. ‘Well, look, I’ve kept it up because we print a deal of Latin. Also you’re soused. Master Vautrollier has just got a patent to print Ovid. The Metamorphoses. Do you remember? Beautiful.’

  ‘I remember.’ The words on the page fade, and instead Will sees his last day at Stratford Grammar School: jokes, hand-shakings, little orations. The schoolmaster on his dais grave and saying nothing. My father needs me at home, sir. No one saying, indeed, that something has gone wrong – that Will who always outpaced everyone should be leaving now, when he might surely … ‘How old is she? Your Madame Vautrollier?’

  ‘She’s not my Madame Vautrollier. I don’t know. Older. A woman.’ Richard sips his wine, then reaches out and puts his arm round Will’s neck. ‘Pardon, Will. About school. Cess and piss on that, what happened, shame on it.’

  They would often touch like this, back then – lie while reading propped against each other, in long grass. Now the gesture seems to fall short. Will pats Richard’s narrow back. ‘No matter. I do very well.’ Smiling painfully they disengage – Richard sitting back into London, Will into Stratford. ‘What became of your lute?’

  Startled, Richard shakes his head. ‘Upstairs somewhere. I didn’t take it to London. No place for that in a day’s business, Will: at the press cockcrow to curfew, three hundred sheets a day else Master Vautrollier swears the devil out of hell. And then I take a taper and study till midnight. Is your heart bleeding?’

  ‘A drop. Go fetch it.’

  ‘We’ll wake the old ones.’

  ‘Then we’ll go out. There’s a moon. Down by the bridge – remember?’

  So, with lute and bottle and flagon, they bundle out a little breathless and hilarious – though a last sobriety plucks Richard: ‘It will mean leaving the door unbarred—’

  ‘You forget you’re in Stratford now, not the great wicked city,’ Will says. ‘We don’t have thieves and murderers here. Only hypocrites.’

  Exhilaration of being abroad in soft night, of slithering down the turfy slope by the last buttress of Clopton Bridge. Life in the dark: frogs creak like hinges, a moth blunders against his hand. Setting his back against the cool stone, Will is content for a moment just to cradle the lute: to feel its speaking shape. It came from Richard’s great-uncle, once steward in a lord’s household; he had taught Richard, who had taught Will, so that between them they could manage a dozen songs, all full of tears and cruel mistresses. His fingers search the strings for memory. He thinks suddenly of the woman at Hewlands Farm, of the upright set of her head on the slender neck: of swans and silver goblets and things perfectly made.

  ‘Tune it, for God’s sake, tune it.’ Richard groans. ‘The second course is all out. And the chanterelle. Sounds like a sow in farrow. Better.’

  ‘“If pity do not move your heart,

  These tears of mine behold…”

  ‘How does it go on?’

  ‘“That ever thus do burn and smart.”’

  ‘“In fire I waste, whiles you are cold…” Damn. I sound like ten sows. I used to know this song backwards.’

  ‘You’re out o
f practice. And I told you, man, you’re piss-eyed.’

  Will stills the strings. ‘So is it like that, Richard? The sighing and burning and wanting to die at her feet?’

  ‘Why ask me?’ A laugh, but moonlight finds a flash of alarm in his eyes.

  ‘You’re a Londoner now. It must be different. There must be – there must be women, many women—’

  ‘A great many women, of every condition, aye. And one sees, and often admires. But I’m a prentice, and I mean to do well. I must live cleanly. And I may not marry till my time is out. So.’

  ‘To be sure … but how if the killing dart strikes you – if a glance smites you with a wound there is no healing.’

  ‘That only belongs in songs and sonnets.’ Richard grunts. ‘Besides, in London the wound there’s no healing is likelier to strike you in your cods.’ A laugh, but Will realises he has touched the Puritan in him. Here comes the return. ‘Will, have you not bound yourself prentice to your father?’

  ‘No. But I live, God knows, cleanly as any prentice.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. People – people wonder about him. Father says he still doesn’t come to council meetings. Some say he fears arrest for debt. They even excused him the poor-rate last session. Yet he can’t have lost so much, surely? He still trades—’

  ‘Well, you know as much as me, it seems. Do you suppose he takes me into his confidence?’ Will lays the lute down on the grass, with a momentary picture of himself lifting it on high and smashing it. Not a good thing to do: but clear-cut, at least. ‘Two years since, he sold off the last of my mother’s property. No doubt the shades of her old Arden kinsfolk wailed at it, but I think most of his creditors were satisfied. What happened? I don’t know.’ And that would be the worst shame of all for my father, Will thinks, if I were to know. ‘I believe he overreached. He had risen so high and it was all so golden – he even made application to the College of Heralds for a coat of arms. John Shakespeare, gentleman. Then suddenly he stopped talking of it. I know he burned his fingers trading wool. Perhaps there were other misadventures … Richard, do you think it possible that a man may be doomed to ill-fortune? Nature and circumstance meeting in him, so potently, with such black perfection, that there is no escape?’ Another moth comes and alights on his sleeve: he cups it in his hand. ‘He may do what he will. There is no escape.’