The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Read online

  He wasn’t here to see his son dying. He is here, perhaps, to see something else weaken, fail, begin to die, or cease to have a reason to live.

  * * *

  The letter arrives in October, when there has been no Hamnet for two months, and a dank spoiled harvest lies thin in the barns.

  Never a quick reader, and growing dim-sighted, John Shakespeare hands it to his dutiful son Richard. It’s from Will, of course. And at first Anne, listening fitfully to Richard’s monotone growl through the wool of grief, can’t quite understand it.

  ‘“Faithful and approved service … Gold on a bend sable, a spear of the first, steeled argent, and for his crest or cognisance…’”

  Her father-in-law has risen from his fireside seat as if to do something – one of those little fidgets or dustings that occupy so much of his day – but instead he stands quite still, hands extended, eyes open wide and lit as she has never seen them before.

  ‘“Motto, Non Sans Droict, meaning Not Without Right. The arms to be borne by his children, issue, and posterity…’” Richard glances awkwardly at Anne as he reads that part. She is taking it in now. The Shakespeare grant of arms, it seems, is made. No Hamnet to carry it on, of course. Yesterday a maimed beggar came through Stratford when she was marketing, and held up the stump of his arm beseechingly, and she looked at it thinking, Yes, what?

  ‘Well, well. What think you?’ Her father-in-law glances unsteadily around him, balancing and trembling a little, as if he stands atop a high pillar. ‘What think you, hey?’

  It’s Edmund who speaks: given, at long last, the chance to say the right thing to his father. ‘Sir, you are made a gentleman,’ he says, bowing, ‘and it is richly deserved.’

  ‘Aye, aye. May it be so. Edmund, heart, go fetch thy mother, she must hear of this. Well, well.’ His eye falls on Anne. ‘You must be proud, daughter.’

  She wants to ask: of whom? But she can’t speak, or the effort of speaking is beyond her.

  No matter: John Shakespeare is happy to repeat it, like a prayer, or an order. ‘You must be proud.’ At last he moves, stepping away from his perennial fire, going to the window that looks out on Henley Street. ‘Fair weather for the season.’ Outside, grey cloud lowers. ‘Ought to take advantage of it. Go about a little. Aye, time to go about.’

  So, Anne thinks, Will has won him. So he goes on winning everyone. I wonder how he will ever win me again.

  12

  The Broken Heart (1598–1601)

  ‘How did you come here, my son?’

  Ben shook off the intrusively gentle hand. He had been trying to float his mind on the placid, lucid waters of the ancients, to meditate on the stoicism of Epictetus. But this wretched priest would not leave him alone.

  ‘I’m not your son. You’re scarce older than me, for one thing.’ That in itself gave away that the fellow was a priest – but he had besides a milk-fed look Ben associated with papists. ‘As for how I came here, by the same gate as you. And I dare say I’m going to the same place.’

  ‘There I differ,’ was all the priest said, with a smile of peculiar sweetness.

  The smile stayed with Ben when he rolled up in his bedding and tried again to steep his mind in philosophy. Such a smile seemed out of place not only in Newgate: it was, surely, out of place in the world. Or at least the world as he knew it.

  The priest was back in irons, he noted, peering down the long dungeon room: incarceration here had given him the night-eyes of a cat. Doubtless he had run out of garnish money, or of friends outside to bring it. Ben was lucky in that regard. He had Agnes, and she made sure there was enough to keep him out of irons, fed and warm. Not that she liked coming near the prison, which he understood, what with the danger of gaol-fever, and little Ben, his son and heir, at home. Also she said she would never forgive him for putting himself here, and possibly on the gallows: but, there, that was women. They didn’t use words to convey information, but to create an emotional effect.

  He listened for a few moments to the noise of Newgate, which for most of the time he managed to block out of his consciousness, as he had at nights in Flanders when dying horses had bellowed long. Nothing edifying: drunken shouts from the taproom, distracted rattling of chains, curses. Somewhere a woman repeatedly threw herself against a door and screeched: ‘I’m with child, I’m with child.’ The condemned cells? Hard to tell the direction with the echoes. Pleading her belly, obviously, but it didn’t seem to be working. Perhaps she was pretending. She must have been ugly indeed if none of the gaolers would impregnate her.

  In all the racket and stink the priest was the only one, apart from Ben, who seemed self-possessed.

  The thought that the priest knew something he didn’t was, to Ben, infuriating. Even here in Newgate, Ben Jonson maintained his pride, his sense of himself: he wore the inviolate crown of his mind. And, after all, why not? He had done nothing wrong.

  To be sure, he had killed a man. But under such circumstances as made it forgivable, surely. Well, there was the question. On that – apt pun – everything was to hang.

  He saw the priest doing it to another prisoner: the hand on the arm, the enquiring look. The prisoner was an incoherent bull-neck who had sold everything, even his shoes, for drink, and he flung the priest away to the length of his chain.

  ‘Why do you keep it up?’ Ben asked him, in genuine curiosity. ‘You know they’ll hang you for it.’

  ‘Probably. Or burn. But keep up what, my friend? You speak of the faith as if it were a trick or a habit. Burning: it’s already a burning.’ The priest shifted on his mouldy straw. ‘Can you imagine waking each morning and thinking not, Oh, well, another day, but instead –’ he gave a gasp of difficulty, smiling ‘– greeting the ineffable mystery: again, the ineffable, ever-renewed mystery of living with God and for God through his grace and his holy church?’

  Ben scowled as the drunken brute lay down on his bunk with his hand groping in the front of his breeches. ‘This faculty is not given to all men, I take it.’

  The priest delicately inclined his head; the gesture seemed to include all sorts of possibilities, including amusement. These subtleties. Quite different from your slab-faced Puritan, at any rate.

  ‘Perhaps. That is one of the many things that are hidden. We guess at the divine shadows as they flicker. But you recall my asking why you are here. It’s because I have, I think, an answer. Mother Church has been waiting for you.’

  ‘I need no mother,’ Ben said quickly. ‘I have one. I have the most excellent one.’

  ‘And do you have a God?’

  Ben shrugged irritably. ‘You want to convert me to your faith, and it would be a deal less tedious if you just said so.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t, because I can’t do that. You can only come to it through your free will and the operation of grace.’ The priest began to unwrap and tend his fetter-sores. ‘I merely add: don’t keep God waiting.’

  Oh, they had trained him well in Douai, or wherever it was. But it was lucky for the priest that Ben’s curiosity overcame his disgust. And then there was the tremendous potency of that idea: of God waiting for him.

  He thought about Agnes, a little; about his splendid son, a lot. He thought about lying here, a common felon, waiting for the trial where his greatest hope was to escape with his life. He hated the idea of being common and he hated the waiting, with its corollary of humble obedience. To be waited for, on the other hand, was impressive.

  Also, he wanted to match this priest in lack of fear: measure himself against him, as he had the Spanish champion in the damp field.

  Also, if they were going to kill the most brilliant man in England, he might as well feel his difference in every vein.

  ‘I don’t say anything of conversion.’ He gave the priest a drink from his ale-jug and the heel of his bread. ‘But if you were to hear my confession, what sort of step would that be?’

  ‘A step.’ The priest smiled wryly, as if to say he was the casuist here.

  * * *
r />   Very well. The confession of Ben Jonson. You should know first who I am. I am a poet of the theatre. I have been player, play-corrector, maker of play-plots, part-writer of plays with lesser men, and lately play-maker in my own right. And in that regard, I may as well say I am the best. There are one or two very choice spirits writing for the stage just now, but none who know what they are about as I do, none who comprehend the importance of classical models, of making a play exercise the intellect and not the jaws. And so I find it hard to believe that this is to be my end, unless there be some greater meaning overarching all.

  I don’t turn to you or your church out of fear. I’m no stranger to prison, to begin with. It’s scarce above a year since they clapped me in irons for writing a play. Part-writing, that is. It was writ with Tom Nashe, an odd flighting fellow who can scarce pick up a pen without mischief. We made some glances at the Court, and Nashe may have spiced it with some slanders I didn’t recognise. He escaped to Yarmouth when the Privy Council stirred, but me they took up and threw in the Marshalsea. Oh, the storm blew over, and I was let go; and the Crown must be protected from sedition, after all. You’ll not convert me against my country, sir priest, I may as well say now.

  When it happened – what put me here – I was at the top of the tree. My play was on, my first, if I may style it so, master-work. Every Man In His Humour. The first comedy to grace our stage that truly observes the model of the ancients and the requirement of comedy to teach and reform even as it delights. This purpose: this is what’s lacking in my friend Will Shakespeare. Still, I love the man and his works, mark you – love them all the more for their frailties, which is how I imagine the love of God for humankind.

  And it was Will Shakespeare who gave me my opportunity. Without him, I truly confess it, I might still have been patching broken plays for that titanic dullwit Henslowe. Or tramping the roads by the play-wagon. Not my taste. True, I was not the greatest of players. Oh, I had presence – perhaps too much of it. A player is only an imitating ape, after all. No, the writing for me, the handling of words, the shaping and constructing. And shaping to a moral purpose, to show humanity its true face in the glass. So my play, on these humours that men affect nowadays – one is forever jealous, another is forever melancholy. My fear was, in the writing, that I would write too far above the heads of our dear necessary Hydra, the audience. All those heads and no brain betwixt them. And Henslowe, the idiot I mentioned, shook his wooden poll over it. It was my good friend Shakespeare who saw its worth, and persuaded his company, the Chamberlain’s Men, to put it on. Praise be! Come September, the piece was mounted at the Curtain – and I found myself the very ornament of the stage, the cynosure of the season, the North Star of the theatrical constellation. The booby groundlings clapped their paws; but the learned, I believe, smiled the truer approbation. I mean to have it printed, if God wills.

  And from there – to here. The bills were still up for my play when I was placed under arrest. It all happened mighty fast. Yet the moment – the killing moment – seemed to endure an age. I fancy I still live in it yet, sometimes.

  His name was Gabriel Spencer and he was a player. Not so long ago we were friends, of a sort. He was a good companion when the ale was good and his temper was good and no one set their voice against his. But there was a black side to him. I know that he once killed a young fellow in a fight, because he would make a brag of it, of how it was deemed mischance and he was set free. Well, here is my fault, I think: being too high in my pride of spirits, from seeing my play triumph, and giving them free rein when Spencer was present and with the worst mood on him.

  I was dining with a few acquaintance at a tavern in Hog’s Lane, and Spencer joined us. The thunder on his brow should have cautioned me, but I was warm and over-easy. I spoke of the reform I meant to bring to the stage, and how I was particularly well equipped to do it. I learned of the great William Camden, no less. Well: it turned ugly. Spencer began casting doubt on my learning. Oh, this was easily crushed, I was able to quote him quite out of his senses. But then any sensible man would have conceded and drank about. Spencer must needs hang on like a dog with its teeth in the bear’s hide. ‘Malgré all this parade of learning,’ he cries, ‘you’re a mere player like the rest of us, and when your day is done, you will be glad enough to turn back to the honest trade you forsook to exhibit your abominable pride among us. And, my God, we shall be glad too. So to your tools, sir bricklayer, to your tools…’ Forgive me, I have a capacious memory, and so I give it you verbatim.

  A bricklayer, yes, that was the hateful craft I was bred to. A very good, honest craft, I dare say, for nature’s bricklayers. Of whom I am not one. And so I said to Spencer – in so many words. But naturally there was no forgiving the insult he offered me. Nor would he withdraw it. So we came to a duel. A true fair duel with rapiers, none of this ragged drawing of weapons in the street.

  We met in Hogsden Fields. It was a beautiful day: clear, warm, golden September. No day to be contemplating a killing or a dying. At the last, for all the foulness of his disposition, I fancy Spencer thought it so, and wondered about recanting. Me? No. Not for a moment. Never for a moment.

  He wounded me in the arm – there, see. Thank God, it healed clean. He was a fierce fighter. I could see the fury in his eyes. What he saw in my eyes – well, the righteousness of a man traduced.

  His reach was longer, but I made a stroke, a bold wild stroke, beneath his guard. And that was the one. It went deep into his side. It does not slice in, like carving meat. Even with the keenest point it feels more like thrusting your sword into something tough and jarring. Your whole neck and chest and shoulder ache at it.

  It was the matter of the bricklayer, you see. And disdaining my learning. My stepfather is a bricklayer and I have striven, dear God, I have striven … Do I need to explain? I hope not.

  Absolution? Well. I like the sound of it. The very word is like a cleaning blast of water. But we’ll see.

  Well, I was taken up. A man lay dying and mine was the red sword, and these things get about. A duel, but still a killing. Will the court find it murder? There’s the question. Is murder an an unclergyable offence? For if I plead benefit of clergy … Once I remember saying a man must be a coward to take advantage of this quaint old letter of the law, letting him ’scape hanging if he can read. Yet now it is my one hope.

  In this world, I mean. As for the next, is that not your province? Repentance, aye, I understand there must be repentance. But tell me, where is the line drawn betwixt regretting your sins, and wishing you had never committed them?

  Spencer had no wife or child, or none that I know of. But nothing could have made a difference. Nothing, after what he said.

  Kneel?

  Well. If you think it will help.

  * * *

  If anything saved him, he knew it would be learning. When the day of the gaol-delivery came, and he was marched across the incongruously pretty garden to the courtroom in Old Bailey, he knew he was going among enemies. The judge on high with the bunch of sweet herbs before his tender nose, the citizen jurymen blowing and staring: in the purest sense they did not care about him, and would willingly send him to be hanged, if nothing cried out against it. He was not Ben Jonson the most learned man in England here, but Benjamin Jonson the prisoner. The prisoner was taken up with the weapon still at his side. The prisoner stands accused … the prisoner admits … He wanted to cry out, There is more to me than this. But here, of course, there was not. And there was nothing he could say or do that would change their minds. The guard behind him yawned and shifted the weight of his halberd. Dust-motes rotated in a thin shaft of window-light. Ben tried to see God in it. Only learning could help.

  ‘The aforesaid Benjamin Jonson feloniously and wilfully slew and killed the aforesaid Gabriel Spencer at Shoreditch.’ The judge repeated it, though the juryman had a good strong voice, suitable for a theatre. ‘Prisoner, how do you plead?’

  ‘I plead benefit of clergy.’ Now there was a vo
ice for you. Fill your chest, expand your lungs. If the judge did not allow it – if books were consulted, precedents reviewed, heads shaken, then – then it would be very much like the dreams that had exhausted him the last few nights in his cell, dreams so brilliant and dramatic he had begun to mistrust the power of his own imagination. And so to Tyburn tree to dangle. They would need a strong rope. I am not afraid. But how did I get here? Sure never was so long a chain of mad mistakes …

  The bishop’s chaplain walked up to the dock. Ben took the psalter. It felt greasy in his hands, as if it had propped someone’s dinner. It was salvation. Earthly, perhaps heavenly, but just now he had his mind only on the one.

  ‘Choose your verse, prisoner.’

  Verse? Let me give you the whole thing, first in Latin, then in Greek … He chose, and read with eloquent expression, fixing the chief juryman’s eye. On impulse he kissed the book when he had finished.

  ‘Legit ut clericus?’ intoned the judge.

  ‘Legit.’ Read like a clerk. And so his plea was accepted. He tried to picture Agnes’s face, or his little son’s curly head, but all he could think of was great tall windows opening out. And the subtle smile of the old priest in his cell. Well, he thought: a bargain. The tears in his eyes surprised him intensely.

  But then they did duty for what happened next, which was the branding. He had a little dealing with the hangman after all. And an ungentle brute he was, though Ben supposed that was part of the profession. Marched up to the brazier, which gave off a kindly Christmas sort of heat, he clenched his tongue between his teeth and resolved not to cry out. To his embarrassment, he did groan a little when the brand went sizzling into the base of his left thumb. Not just the pain but the nakedness of that letter T, marking him as a felon, marking him for Tyburn tree if he offended again. No benefit of clergy twice. He belonged to death, if he were not virtuous, and he hated belonging to anyone.

  But he had survived. Marched back to the gaol, Ben wondered if there was anything he could not survive. That was the sin of pride, perhaps: he would have to find out from a priest of his new faith. Or perhaps consult his own understanding. The True Church had undoubtedly been waiting for him, but he intended being his own pope.