The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Read online

  * * *

  Ben held his son high, up to the rafters of their poky parlour: the lad crowed, he loved it, the higher the better. ‘Oh, my chick, I love thee,’ he said. He looked at Agnes, who had finished her relieved crying, and was sitting at the table, head in hands. ‘And thee, sweetling.’ The cloth was gone, he noted, and a few pieces of plate – pawned, doubtless, for the gaoler’s fees had been heavy and they were short of money. He put little Ben down. Best get to work.

  ‘Never,’ his wife said, raising her stormy face, ‘never put me through such a thing again.’

  She actually looked fiercely accusing. He shrugged. Anyone would suppose, he thought, as he began looking for paper, that she was the one who had been in prison.

  * * *

  ‘The whole thing,’ Will says, ‘has seemed to me a terrible marvel. One moment I’m acting in your play; the next I hear you are marked for the gallows.’

  ‘Why are we mortals so surprised when life takes a turn for the unexpected, when we cannot even tell what tomorrow’s weather will be?’

  ‘It will be cold, because it’s January.’

  Jonson laughs. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to kill a man.’

  ‘Oh, faith, that goes without saying.’ They are coming out of the turreted lodge of the Marshalsea prison, where Jonson was thrown for a debt to another actor. Will has paid it off. Jonson looks pale but hearty. ‘Will you promise me now to keep your head out of gaol for at least half a year?’

  ‘Hm, that would be making an impious declaration against the will of God, which may be that I should suffer the martyrdom of the cell again. But no. For the love I bear thee, Will, I make thee a promise. Besides, there will be nothing worth presented on the stages so long as I’m out of commission.’

  Freezing new year 1599. Harsh winters following lean harvests: full boneyards. But Will Shakespeare is still prosperous, if at something of a stand in his career just now. The Chamberlain’s Men are without their usual home, the Theatre, the lease having run out on the land. In fact, the Burbages do have the substance of the Theatre, because they took down every timber and strut and tile of it in the winter dark and are ready to put it up again when they can find a site. In Southwark probably, where Will is living now, modestly. Giving up the large house in Bishopsgate has been a saving. (And, of course, it was imperative. He won’t even walk that way now.) Southwark, place of stews and actors, bear-gardens and prisons. A terrible marvel, Will called what happened to Ben Jonson, or rather what Ben Jonson inflicted: and he has hardly conveyed to his friend just how terrible he found it. It was Henslowe who first told him of it. ‘Yon bricklayer has killed one of my best players,’ he grumbled; and no one suitable to poach from the Chamberlain’s.

  At first Will suspected a theatrical exaggeration: not actual killing. When he heard about the brute scene in Hogsden Fields he had no trouble in imagining it – old imperishable memories of Knell and Towne rushed in there – but could not explain it. The waste, the waste: and Jonson just on the verge of great things with his play. There was a madness in men, one always knew that; but the madness of self-destruction was the most baffling.

  And then, when Jonson was delivered from peril of his life by the fortunate accident of the neck-verse, he announced to his friends on his release that he had become a Catholic. Nashe was quietly scornful. ‘Pray don’t pay him too much attention on account of it,’ he said, with vinegar smile, ‘for that’s all the reason of his conversion.’ Will thought there was more to it. There must be, for a man to lay himself open to charges of recusancy, to lay up trouble for himself as a potential enemy of the state; and all for what? But he could hardly take up that question without exposing himself to Jonson’s eager cross-questioning; and in himself he had dusky vacancies and gaps on which he wanted no searching light to fall.

  When, three months after his escape from the gallows, Jonson was taken up for debt, it seemed to Will almost a comforting piece of normality. And now he is free, and no doubt will want to rejoin his family in Westminster.

  ‘Time enough for that. I worked on a new plot for Henslowe whiles I was detained, a neat piece of Terence brought up to date, and you might like to hear it through over a glass. Oh, Henslowe will forgive, man, because Henslowe, like most mortals, is made of self-interest, and I am useful to him.’

  So, the Mermaid instead. Boat across the river, Jonson leaping the wharf-stairs three at a time. Such energy and appetite. Thrusting into the city streets, Jonson begins telling him at length of his plans for a sequel to Every Man In His Humour, in which he will set out his theories of the drama in a prologue or preface.

  ‘And after the prologue or preface, will you have a trumpet-blast to let the audience know it’s time to wake up?’

  ‘A low hit. Unworthy,’ Jonson says, seating himself at ease. The Mermaid features broad settles and stools, apt for his behind, which, unthinned by prison, is like a bag of laundry. ‘You must buy me a drink to atone.’

  They are joined by Thomas Dekker. Three parts ink and one part wine, a Londoner born and bred, with a sharp, dark, winking face and shoulders up to his ears, Dekker has lately begun pulling at the galley-oar of play-writing: a scene here, a rewriting there, wherever I am wanted. It is his boast that he was once woken by Henslowe at three in the morning with a mere play-plot, and he had the first two acts ready before noon. Will likes him, for his modesty and the earthy liveliness he brings to his writing; Jonson condescends to him. They make a sort of triangle.

  Dekker shudders at the mention of the Marshalsea. ‘Don’t, I pray you. I’ve been in the rough belly of the debtors’ prison. I don’t care to be swallowed again.’

  ‘Why, talking of it won’t make it happen,’ Jonson says.

  ‘Won’t it? As to that, I don’t know. Observe how you come across a new word for the first time. Ten to one you will hear that word again within a few days.’

  ‘What’s your meaning? That mere superstition should govern our lives?’

  ‘I’m content for anything to govern our lives, as long as it be kind,’ Dekker says, with a placating shrug.

  ‘Why, man, who would ever feel alive without adversity? Who feels the merry fire who’s never starved in the cold?’

  ‘Is this your priest’s chop-logic?’ says Will.

  ‘You pale puerile Puritan. You have not opened yourself to the mystery of the faith.’

  ‘A mystery that will land you with a fine,’ says Dekker, ‘or worse.’

  ‘If you keep quiet about it you may still do pretty well,’ Will says. ‘The Queen said she wanted no windows into men’s souls.’

  ‘Quiet?’ Jonson booms. ‘Why should I be quiet?’

  ‘Or how, indeed? It seems scarce a possibility,’ Will says.

  Dekker shakes his head. ‘I don’t understand a man’s laying up trouble for himself.’

  ‘Oh, you follow this fellow’s lead, hey?’ Jonson says, slapping Will’s shoulder. ‘Anything to be liked.’

  ‘Yes, I want to be liked,’ Dekker says. ‘For myself not so much, for my work certainly, I want to be popular. Who wouldn’t?’

  ‘But at what price, man?’ Jonson says impatiently. ‘If you write for apes you must write like an ape.’

  ‘But bating all flattery, Will doesn’t write like an ape, and he is popular,’ Dekker says, with a look both innocent and shrewd. ‘So how do you account for it, grave Master Jonson?’

  Jonson twitches his shoulders in irritation. ‘I need more drink if I’m to bear this nonsense. Besides, you’re thinking of retiring from it, aren’t you? The house in the country. Setting up a future, clovered, away from all this, isn’t that in your mind?’

  ‘No. I’ve never thought of that,’ says Will, hastily: too hastily. ‘The house is for my family. The money invested for their future. But I’m devoted whole-heart to the Chamberlain’s Men. When they raise the new theatre I shall be with them. If the pale puerile Puritans allow.’

  ‘Though at least they’re zealous in what the
y believe,’ Jonson says, eyeing him.

  Will signals for more ale. ‘Now why would Ben Jonson, a man of reason, a man who never prated of religion before, join the papists? Could it be he must have a stick to beat the world with, even when it is not at odds with him?’

  Jonson does not answer until the jug is refilled, and then he speaks, quite temperately for him. ‘You may be in the right of it, my friend. But it would be good to see you take up any sort of stick, for once.’ And from the grave Will hears Robert Greene enquiring, just as temperately, just as sharply: When are you going to live?

  * * *

  The years: when you were young, they were like great rooms. You entered each one with attentive solemnity, you looked all round it, accustomed yourself to its dimensions, its furnishings, the feeling in its air. You were going to spend some time here.

  That was how it used to be, for Will. Now time has changed its manner of living: turned nomad. Now he’s out in the open, and there are no thresholds, and he moves on without quite knowing how far he has gone. The years are invisible. Except when you look in the mirror and think, I’ve slept and woken and missed something; or find an old grief or joy, thin and reproachful, like a tethered beast you forgot to feed.

  It is Matthew who reminds Will most forcefully of his ageing. A magical being, with his shooting growth, his transformations. Will watches in troubled admiration and tenderness, trying to locate his feeling. Fatherly? Ah, but that shouldn’t be. Not after Hamnet. When he revisits that place in the heart, there is so much grey ash, he can hardly move, staggering and choked. Better to put yourself in this, this living world, this professional world where he works on bringing out Matthew’s gift. The youth has all and more of the ability he once had to lose his self in playing. Even, above all, his sex.

  ‘“Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am in a holiday humour, and like enough to consent.” So?’

  ‘Excellent,’ Will says. ‘All simplicity. As simple as a woman disguised as a man pretending to be a woman can be.’

  Matthew laughs and rubs at his corn-fair hair. ‘Thank God for the disguise part. I swear the Rosalind wig is lousy.’

  ‘Do you ever have trouble remembering the real you?’

  ‘Remember? There’s no past in it. I am whoever I am at that moment,’ Matthew says. ‘You must know that.’

  ‘Must I?’ Watching Matthew sit bonelessly, painlessly, on the boards, Will feels as old as the rocks.

  ‘Yes. You taught me it.’

  Sometimes there seems to Will something almost cruel about Matthew’s luminous gentleness, like the sure-handed care of a good butcher. Sometimes he imagines Matthew has a twin, who is unteachable and awkward and dark.

  ‘“Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”’ Again that shining, cheerful simplicity, as if life is indeed a garden, with nothing at its edges but ivied kindly walls.

  Will writes home, enquiring about wool prices.

  * * *

  New Place.

  This is the house in Stratford that Will buys for his family to live in. The house that says to the town, Look at what Will Shakespeare’s strange scheme has wrought; and says to his father, simply, Look: we are restored.

  It is the second biggest house in the town, built by the eminent Stratfordian Hugh Clopton who also took the south road to make his fortune in London, and ended up Lord Mayor. It stands on the corner of Chapel Street, three sides around a courtyard: as big, Anne thinks, as many a whole street in London. Needing a great deal of work when Will makes the purchase – but the work can be done, there is money for that too.

  ‘Ten fireplaces,’ murmurs Judith Sadler, when she and her husband make their first tour of it, when the builders are still hammering and sawing. ‘Count them. Ten fireplaces, husband.’

  ‘Aye, heart. So you can warm your backside wherever you find yourself,’ says Hamnet Sadler, with his little apologetic, unhappy laugh.

  New Place, being made new for Anne, for Susannah and Judith and, of course, for Will whenever he is home. Which will surely be, in time, more and more, else why fix himself in Stratford so grandly? And perhaps something else is embodied in these stripped panels, clear-glazed windows, barn and stable and buttery: something like a new start. New Place, and this new place they have come to in their marriage, their lives.

  A place of ultimate division.

  The absence of Hamnet is the absence between them, of understanding, of warmth. She cannot forgive Will for Hamnet’s death. Cannot forgive him for living on, acting, making plays, making money, instead of being swallowed up by that death as she is. And she cannot forgive herself – for these things, and for looking at her husband, when he’s home, and thinking:Why can’t I have my son instead of you, when you’re no good to me, and we can’t love each other worth a farthing, love each other in a way that changes things? Surely the only true love: spell-love. And if you had said to her, ‘You want something from Will that will bring Hamnet back, or make up for his death, and that’s impossible,’ she would have said, ‘Yes, that’s what I want, exactly.’

  The years, for Anne: she is not like Will, she has never moved neatly through them. She has always drunk time and dipped in and out of it, flowing, and sometimes she couldn’t breathe for it, sometimes it exhausted her, but always she has been of its element. Now it pushes her, the years, the days, like a constant head wind. She wouldn’t be surprised to hear herself talking and walking backwards. Often, quite coolly, she supposes she will go mad.

  Once she approached the ultimate madness. She woke from a dream of Hamnet so real that it was unbearable, simply, to return to the life where he was not. It was before the move to New Place. She woke and went into Susannah and Judith’s bedchamber. Sleeping, they were so beautiful, characterful, perfect. And yet. And yet it wasn’t enough. So she realised a terrible thing: that there was a limit to happiness, but no limit to suffering. So she went downstairs. The household was asleep, though it was at least two hours before midnight she reckoned: early to bed in John Shakespeare’s house. Quietly she unbarred the door and went out.

  It was summer, you see. He died in the summer, among the heat and the green. And here was summer breathing its choicest. Brought up on a farm, Anne lived in as close relation to the sun as pears on a wall. Familiar, that sensation of lengthening days, the light of evening persisting so long and light of morning appearing so early they left only a sliver of night between them. Going out of Stratford she found the world brimming with light. Always before, summer had had the feeling of life announcing something. Now it was mute. Oh, she had never known till now what silence was; how silence, through the long waning of the afternoon, could seem in its accumulated weight and profundity to be on the verge of an utterance. The living summer was dead. The sky was still lit, there was a running sparkle on the river, trees washed their reflections. Movement in the branches, some spirit abroad, perhaps. Give me that boy and I will go with thee … Not for thy fairy kingdom. Anne stood on the bridge looking around, looking down. Beauty. She looked at it like a patient parent with a child’s drawing. A long dry moan came from her. She already knew she would not climb up and leap. She was too afraid – afraid perhaps that what lay at the bottom of the river might be the same intolerable dream. No choice but to be.

  So she returned, through a landscape still at eleven o’clock seething with rose-stained shadows; and for the first time she realised that today was the longest day of the year.

  New places. After Hamnet’s death, Will gave up the big London house, and took modest lodgings near the theatres. Unspoken, that there would be no more London household. Instead, this, with its ten fireplaces.

  ‘The handsomest property in the town,’ John Shakespeare said. ‘He has done well, daughter. We— Certainly he has done well.’

  He gives you this, Anne thinks, the first time she walks around her new home-to-be, in return for what he takes away.

  ‘You expect too much of marriage,’ Judith Sadler told her.
She seemed to grow more snappily scornful of Hamnet as he grew gentler, more thoughtful, even handsomer with age. ‘It’s a matter of shaking down with the fellow, and then be sure of your family well placed, and all the rest is flummery.’

  You didn’t have to tell Anne that, though: she knew it perfectly, intimately, as you know your supreme folly.

  ‘You’ll not be minded to move in until the work’s finished, I think,’ Will said, as they stood in the courtyard, surrounded by New Place, and their usual dead, tingling air.

  ‘Well. We could. It’s habitable. The children want to move in now.’

  ‘Hm. Children always think they know what they want.’

  ‘And then they grow up, and cease knowing.’

  Soon, she thought, we won’t say the children. Instead we’ll say the girls. And that will be Hamnet dead once more. Discovery: you never stop losing a child. Not worth trying to say, though, across this crippled air.

  So she and the children, the girls, moved in while the house was still half repaired, and Will went back to London, leaving her in charge. Bartholomew expected her to be helplessly at the mercy of builders and tradesmen. ‘I won’t be imposed on,’ she told him, noticing the broken veins on his nose. ‘Once, I might have been.’ But unhappiness of this kind, it seemed, was a great simplifier. Large areas of life now had no power against her. Anne directed the renovations, reckoned up day-wages and costs, and even tore up floorboards herself when it was going too slowly for her.

  A new place, living apart for the first time – so it seems – from John Shakespeare. So, freedom, in all its complexity. No longer the ally at her side, fighting her cause. And yet that Father John, her champion against the giant trampling dreams of Will, is fading, almost gone. See him instead walking about New Place, measuring its capacious rooms with a bright, wondering eye: and then see him walk on down the street, slow and steady in the sunshine, lifting a hand in sober greeting here and there. Master Shakespeare. Good sir, your servant. On his way to the council chamber, where he has resumed his place, his so rightful place. New place: where he is not just John Shakespeare, alderman, but John Shakespeare, gentleman.