The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Read online

  What is Will to say? It was too cold, it was too stiff, it didn’t move in any sense … Whatever he says will ally him with the idiot multitude who clap their paws for his Shylock, his Falstaff, his somehow-living impurities. How do I make them live? I give them life. And they give me a life in return.

  When they all repair after the play to the Mermaid, Will hopes to avoid saying anything. Perhaps they can just be convivial, leave the subject untouched in the middle. But conviviality won’t come. The wearying speeches, the goose-hissing of the crowd, lie heavily over everyone. ‘Well,’ says Burbage, half giving a toast, ‘we gave it everything, friends; and everything we received in return, as due reward…’ The speech falls apart. People find excuses to go home early. Will and Jonson, and a few others, stay on drinking. Unwise, after the event. But they are not drunk – or at least, neither of them loses coherence in liquor. Somehow the bare thoughts slip out. Somehow, instead of the usual fencing, there is the clash of verbal steel.

  ‘But you can’t lecture an audience into loving you.’

  ‘There – love – you betray yourself. I don’t want to be loved when I create, man, I want to inspire thought, reflection, moral improvement.’

  ‘A great pill to swallow ungilded.’

  ‘Let them choke on it, then.’

  ‘You see, Ben, they can tell that that’s what you think of them.’

  ‘Aye, and why not? What is the mass of humanity but a parade of voice, vanity and folly?’

  ‘Everything, and everything besides. Look in that mark left by the tapster’s finger there, and you fall into an infinity of worlds.’

  ‘It’s a fingermark like any other, and he’s a tapster like any other.’

  ‘Nothing is like anything else.’

  ‘Wrong. One fool is like another, one thief is like another, and if we do not march them in file in our mind, then chaos is come again. Aye, your words, Will. Your words spin a wondrous penumbra over the mind, in which it cosily blinks and can hardly see a good strong shape.’

  ‘And they beguile the fools and thieves, no doubt.’

  ‘Men of sense, too. I don’t deny that. But it’s the cheers and plaudits that lead you, is it not so, Will Shakespeare? You follow where Goodman Plain wants you to go, laughing comedy or shrieking revenge, and even when you touch brilliance you have a care for him, never take him out of his depth but keep his great flat feet ever on the ground. And you make him feel that he’s a fine fellow, even as you grub up his money.’ (Careful, thinks Will, with alarm, as Jonson says this, shaking: this is how disappointed and jealous Jonson is, beside himself, beyond himself.) ‘In that, you are very like the best class of whore.’

  Careful. ‘You would know more about those than I.’ Too late.

  ‘Oh, I make no denial, I am no domestic mouse, and I suspect have a by-blow coming in a little yard off Hog’s Lane, what then? I am no hypocrite.’ Crimson now. ‘Contrast sweet Master Shakespeare, modest darling of the stage whom everyone loves, dutifully sending home his loot to furnish his honest burgher’s mansion and ray his country wife in silks, and all the time keeping his dirty little mistress in town.’

  Heads are turning. Jonson looks a little frightened at himself: Will is half on his feet. And yet for the moment he is taken merely by sheer astonishment. Not that Jonson knows something – rumour would trickle out eventually – but at the way he says it.

  Keeping a mistress. Is that – great God – is that how they call it?

  * * *

  Ironies: he first moved to the Cripplegate district because Jonson spoke of settling his family there. Also, it seemed a sensible shift for a man of his age and wealth, away from the theatre environs of Southwark and Shoreditch, rackety, quick-knifed. Instead the northern edge of the city, with the country heights visible from his upper window. A better air, as he wrote to Anne, not supposing she would much care. Also it was closer to Matthew’s lodging, so he could keep an eye on him. (A fatherly eye? Well, why not, when the lad had no father?)

  A better place, a new place, away from temptation. And it was Jacqueline Field who recommended the house in quiet Silver Street. It was kept by a respectable French Protestant family of her acquaintance, the Mountjoys. Tire-makers in a thriving line: head-dresses for noble ladies, even royalty, it was murmured. Sober, industrious people, a well-kept house, and there he had two good chambers, meals if he wanted them.

  And Mistress Mountjoy, it turned out, knew Isabelle Berger.

  That might not have meant anything. So, she was back in London: so, if she saw him no doubt it would be like at the Fields’, wanting to draw some response from him that he didn’t understand and didn’t care to. Strange, capricious, sallow woman he knew once. A little hole in the road, a stumble, and on.

  Except … something about the time. The years, dark years without form, without doors in or out, where he walked alone. Anne lay on the other side of the turning world – where he had placed her, or where she had placed herself, or where the great division had left them.

  And on the page and in the theatre he was always occupied with character and exploring what made a person, where the self ended and began. And in Isabelle he discovered a self that he could not read or write. Once it was begun, he could not stop. Because of the mystery.

  Will stares at the black and white squares and thinks: How explain that to Jonson? Would he sneer, say he knows exactly what sort of mystery that is? Will moves his queen’s rook. His queen is peculiarly powerless in this game.

  * * *

  ‘Ah! I was just saying to Mistress Mountjoy,’ Isabelle said, the first time he came downstairs to see her there, warming herself at the fire, ‘how quiet her lodger is. I said, “What can he be doing up there all alone?” But now I see it’s you. And now I know. Master Shakespeare, our most excellent play-maker. What are you working on now?’

  ‘A play of a man who kills a woman for love of her.’

  ‘Oh.’ She yawned. ‘Another stale old tale.’

  Pretty, birdlike Mistress Mountjoy looked a little shocked: she esteemed Will highly.

  ‘Oh, never mind me, my dear,’ Isabelle said, pressing her hand. ‘I may say what I like to Master Shakespeare: he knows my true feeling for him.’

  And then, a look in her eyes: a snap, a lick, God only knew, everything in a look, as he had never quite believed possible. He had tried to avoid the poet’s convention of seeing stars and wonders in a pair of eyes. Eyes could only contain so much, he had thought: until then.

  He blundered back upstairs, trembling as if he had stolen something, and it was under his shirt, precious and spiked.

  * * *

  So, he stood once more at the stair-turning with the warped window looking out on the leads, and the pastille-scent creeping up to him. And he thought: You knew, didn’t you? You knew you would be here again.

  ‘Let us talk,’ she said. She led him into her overheated rooms by the hand. He stayed for three hours, and her hand was all he was permitted, or ordered, to touch. Near the end she put the tip of his forefinger in her mouth, before sending him away with a look of mild contempt.

  He would not go again. In his bedchamber at Silver Street he lay face down, as he had not done since he was a whipped boy, as if exhausted or flattened, blinking, and heart-raging.

  * * *

  ‘How did you know,’ she asked him, licking wine from her hand, ‘about Ophelia?’

  As always, when called on to discuss his work, he felt a shield lift.

  ‘The madness,’ she went on. ‘How did you know that’s how madness is?’

  ‘Not mad. Distracted.’

  ‘The difference?’

  ‘It’s the end of a path. Our path, not a different path. We all fall short of madness, while we have luck, but it’s just over there. How did you know? Or what did you recognise?’

  Isabelle laughed. ‘Great God in heaven, you won’t catch me like that.’

  ‘What?’ Her laughter could sometimes hurt him like a punch in the chest.
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  ‘By asking. Because you cannot even conceive, believe me, the right question. How is your boy-girl?’

  ‘Matthew. His name is Matthew.’ He had told her all about his apprentice. Had told her, probably, everything: he couldn’t be sure – strange memory lapses afflicted him after being with her, as in drunkenness. She drew it out of him, like the conjuror he saw at Bartholomew Fair, pulling the coin from his ear with a smiling wince. That was Will, telling his life in the dark, scented, too-warm room: sitting at a distance, if she is in banishing mood. Or sometimes seated next her on the settle, and Isabelle throwing her leg over his, negligent, boyish, as he and Richard Field used to. The cock-stand was like a long bright headache that did not fade. She knew, saw, was scornfully amused.

  ‘Do you lie with whores?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You should. It’s not fair on your wife to be your whore, not after childbearing.’

  ‘Don’t speak of my wife.’

  ‘Oh, is that today’s game, you pretend yours is the control? Diverting. Why, Monsieur Berger used whores all the time, and I was glad of it. I used to smell them on him and think, Ah, now he is full of guilt, so he will be kind.’

  ‘Was he often not kind?’

  ‘He used to beat me. And worse things – slow, clever, cruel things.’ She turned her head away and wept. Or did she only seem to? He didn’t know what to do. The floor seemed to ripple beneath him. Suddenly she was looking at him and laughing. ‘There. Good, wasn’t it? Really, we should allow women on the stage, should we not?’

  Savagely he jerked back. ‘Do you think I would laugh at that?’

  ‘No. I don’t want you to laugh with me, ever. When we laugh we go away to a distance and look on and I don’t want you up there.’ Her voice was rushed and harsh, a wind of October with leaves and spiders in it. ‘I want you down here with me in the hell dark, sweet.’ She leaned in and bit his lower lip gently. That would be today’s.

  * * *

  Black, and white.

  ‘Your move,’ Jonson says. He makes it sound a dreadful prospect.

  * * *

  ‘Will you hear me read my part? Truly?’ Matthew said. ‘It will be dull work, for it’s the dullest part ever writ.’

  ‘It won’t be dull,’ Will said. And it was not, though the writing was so execrable. Just to sit here, in the tavern garden, and be near Matthew’s cheer and lightness and sometime silliness. And when one of his friends turned up and they fell to drinking, boasting, mock-boxing, silliness indeed, still then Will was happy to sit by, and let a little of it lie across him, like the edge of a bright bar of sunlight.

  * * *

  ‘You are quite a stranger to me,’ the Earl of Southampton said. ‘In all ways.’

  ‘Not in all ways, I hope.’

  ‘I’ve seen your Dane every time. He transports me. They say I spend too much time at the theatres.’ He sighed, a rich, careless sigh. ‘You’re better where you are, my friend, where you may walk unseen in the shade. So how do you call these sonnets?’

  ‘Sonnets, my lord. Every poet has a tilt at this target. They make a shapely vessel to pour one’s small beer in.’

  Southampton looked at him critically. Matthew did that sometimes, when he was talking wisdom: as if he could see someone behind him, prompting his lies. ‘Not these. I see something of me, is that so? Marry and beget. Did my mother urge that on you?’

  ‘Something of you?’ Will said. ‘Something of everything I have ever seen, done, also, and of everyone else. We breathe the air that Caesar expelled from his lungs.’

  ‘Hiding again, Master Shakespeare.’ The earl tosses down the manuscript and motions Will to follow him. The echo of their footsteps welcomes them like gentle applause to the long gallery. ‘I think it is, in essence, a sort of drama or play. Everything turns into a play in your hands, does it not?’

  Will made an equivocal motion with his head. ‘They may be that. Or – you might, my lord, call them touch-pieces.’

  The earl seemed dissatisfied, today, with being unable to pin Will down, where once he had been intrigued. ‘What next for the stage, then? That’s where we would have you. No doubt you may write as you will now, and name your price.’

  ‘Not so, alas. One piece that does not please, and you are cast down with the general.’

  The earl pursed his lips, as if Will were pleading poverty. Something you accepted as you grew older: some friendships decayed, liking spread thin, and there was no help for it. You tried to accept it, at any rate.

  ‘Meaning you still need patrons?’

  ‘No, in truth. But I still know how to value those who have extended the hand to me.’

  ‘I served your purpose, in fact.’

  ‘If I must answer that, my lord, I would ask, did I serve yours?’

  The earl stopped and glared at him, a professional kind of glare. Then it thawed. ‘Forgive me. That’s life at Court: makes a man see nothing but double-dealing and interest.’

  ‘And forgive me if I have been insolent.’

  ‘You have, but you consider you have cause.’ The earl put a hand on his shoulder. His breath was on Will’s face. ‘So you see why it would never have done. Too much arrogance on both sides.’ His eyes dropped and he altered the touch, steering Will to a new-varnished picture. ‘Come see my birthday portrait. What do you think? I’m content enough, but my mother cried out against it and was for stinting the painter’s money.’

  It was a beautiful picture of a beautiful man, but somehow it failed of beauty. ‘Highly finished.’

  ‘A deadening thing at best, to have a portrait made. Have you been painted?’

  Will shrugged. ‘I’ve seen no reason.’

  ‘More false modesty?’

  ‘That depends if you believe there is any such thing as true modesty.’

  The earl chuckled. ‘You’re as jaded as a courtier. Or are you hiding again?’

  After a moment Will said: ‘I can warrant you this, my lord: if you put my picture on this wall, and invited all the court and city and country to bear you company here, not one among them would stop to look at it.’ He hesitated. ‘Thank God.’

  * * *

  ‘You can’t hide it any more, Matt. You’ve been talking false, and it’s the most fearful squeaking. Your voice is broke, isn’t it?’

  Matthew gazed bleak, mutinous, at Will, not seeing him. ‘So that’s it. But look you, I can still take the parts, surely. Henry Bright still plays women, and his voice is long broke.’

  ‘His voice is naturally light in pitch. And still I think he strains it. Yours is low, and it will growl and hoot and be absurd if you try to throw it. Why fear? You are a player, a surpassing player. You’ll take male roles now, that’s all. You know you have me to speak for you. You’ll never lack.’

  ‘I suppose.’ Matthew chewed his lip. Redness surged, blood on snow. ‘The woman parts make you feel exceptional. You have to reach so far. I don’t want to go on stage and – well, rest, let it go. I don’t want to be myself.’

  Will patted his shoulder. ‘That, if you can do it, is the one thing to avoid.’

  Suddenly Matthew’s brow was clear. Emotions flexible as his joints. The secret, perhaps, if you could maintain it, of skimming the pond of life: whatever you felt, it would not be for long. ‘Well. The voice broke surely means I am a man now, and can indulge a man’s liberties – drink, smoke, wench, hey?’

  ‘And ruin your health and bewray your credit,’ Will said, the mock-severity nearly real.

  ‘And matters will change betwixt us, surely,’ Matthew said, lightly teasing. ‘No more of the strict father.’

  Will, achieving a smile, shook his head. ‘A man never loses his father.’

  * * *

  Jonson moves his queen. ‘Check. My words were hasty.’ His eyes slide about, Will’s face, the black and white pattern set out, the tapster. He is a good friend and generous heart, but the whole business of the emotions fatigues him. Also he wants to win the game: this, e
very game. ‘I think I only dared say them because of the love I bear you. Only to those we love do we dare the worst. Not so?’

  Will gazes: black, white, imprinting his eyes. He says: ‘I don’t understand love.’

  * * *

  Climbing the grunting stairs, passing the warped window, he saw his legs entangled by rods of shadow and light. The entanglement, he told himself, is plain enough, and it is temptation of the simplest kind; therefore stop and come no more.

  No, it’s not, it’s something else. It’s a play I’m in, one unwritten: the best kind. And, besides, when he tried to reject the dark, think of the good and belong to the good, dead Hamnet stirred and cried in his grave and Anne, with all the stone force of dead love, rose and smashed him. So, why stop? What do I preserve, if I withdraw? The best and future part of me is gone down into the dark. Plays, they don’t last: they’re like human lives, stretching out their finished time. And I have fears about the eternity of the soul: how is it durable, when I can no more fix my own than nail thistledown?

  ‘Today we will speak nothing but French.’

  ‘But my French is weak.’

  She did not accept but. She killed it with a glance, a twitch of her shoulders. Which, bared, were like smooth brown apples. He acquiesced, because he always did, because her strange brown quiet movements and her hair and look made him, and struggled through a bleeding evening of thorny language. She laughed silently at him, but then most of the time she did; that was nothing to remark. Some words she used were, he guessed, obscene, and some he was sure she invented.

  Suddenly in English, pouring him wine, she said: ‘Do you love me?’

  A short, neat reflection, like the tensing of muscles to jump muck in the street. ‘No. If anything, I hate you.’

  ‘That will suffice.’ She nodded, eyes closed, drinking. She looked desperate and thirsty and shrunken, as if perilously rescued. ‘Why do you come here, Will? Is it hope? Hope that you will get at last into my bed?’

  ‘Your bed,’ he said truthfully, ‘is just another bed, after all.’