The Secret Life of William Shakespeare Read online

  ‘You’ll want to marry before she starts to show. We’d best apply for a bond,’ Will’s father says. ‘Hm, a poor turn-out it will be. Your mother went to the altar slender as her bride-lace.’

  Will has a vision of Anne’s naked whiteness blazing against the dark bed; and likening that moment and this, it seems to him that there is no principle of connection in life at all, only jolts, blind alleys, severance.

  ‘A great belly, a hurry, and no prenticeship, aye, very well,’ says Will, ‘but are we not allowed to rejoice a little, somewhere along the way? This is love, not death.’

  ‘Did I not say I wish you happy? I do, for both your sakes. I wish you happier than I fear is likely, Will. You are not a villain or a wastrel, no, but you excel at small disappointments.’

  * * *

  This could have been worse, Anne thinks, as she serves the spiced ale to Master Shakespeare. And it is he who makes it so surprisingly tolerable – her future father-in-law, who has most unusually stirred from Henley Street and ridden out to Hewlands Farm for this, the meeting.

  ‘Thank you, my dear.’ His eyes meet hers, smiling a little, above the nutmeg steam. Yes, the business is solemn, and trouble and shame are in it, but when he looks at her she has the feeling of an exception being made: like a blanket being gently tugged over you as you fall asleep. ‘Aye, sir,’ he goes on, ‘I recall in your father’s time that was never accounted good barley land. Too strong…’ There is this refusal also to be hurried to the subject: first we prepare the ground, we converse. Bartholomew’s foot taps and fidgets at it; nevertheless he has put on clean bands, he has put forth the solid, sober, goodman side of him. Lately he has been informing himself of the Shakespeare fortunes, the losses and court summonses, the property remaining. It is all out in the light of day now – of market-day – this love that belonged to green dusks roofed over with birdsong. But Master Shakespeare’s gravity makes the occasion bearable.

  And Will, of course – though there is something skewed now about their time together, which is neither snatched nor granted. Papers lie on the table, ready to be attended to when Master Shakespeare has concluded his civilities: when the talk must turn to dowry and jointure and bond. Though her father once began teaching her to read with Bartholomew’s hornbook, she never got much further than the criss-cross row, and she cannot think her presence will be of much use when they fall to conning those inky thorns and loops. Will that be a fit time to say, ‘Come, Will, let us walk a little in the herb garden’? Is it seemly – or where if anywhere does seemly lie, when she is pregnant and their families are arranging their marriage in haste?

  In the end it is the men (as she thinks of Will’s father and her brother) who leave them alone for a space, Master Shakespeare wanting to look over the farm, which he has not seen since old Master Hathaway’s time. She hopes he will not harp on that string too much, knowing Bartholomew’s intolerance of the past – but, still, they tramp off pretty cordially together. Cordiality, indeed, is the note of the whole business so far; and if you take out the sickness and tender breasts and the fact, soon to be loud and undeniable, that she is no maid and a baggage without a shred of regard for her family’s name, it might almost be a normal marriage that is being arranged.

  She wants to say something of this to Will, to make him smile; above all to break the tightness that his father’s presence seems to set on his brow. Instead they find themselves sitting together on the settle by the fire, holding hands. Courtship backwards, she thinks but does not say. Somewhere a voice both familiar and strange nags, Hot love soon cools.

  ‘Well,’ Will says, ‘at least they trust us not to get up to anything we shouldn’t.’

  Though his tone falls so desperately wide of the mark, they laugh together: the laugh a kind of promise, or – in the spirit, perhaps, of those papers on the table – a down-payment. There will be more laughter to come, in their life to come: surely.

  * * *

  At a wedding, a gift of gloves is sometimes made to the guests. Not this one.

  For the marriage that John Shakespeare would in due time have hoped to solemnise between his heir – once out of his apprenticeship – and the daughter of, say, a fellow alderman with a tidy property, there would have been a gift of gloves for every guest; there would have been everything befitting. But that is the life that did not happen.

  See in a wood or on a heath how a path forms. When does it begin? Someone habitually walks that way, perhaps, and then another, and another; and then someone walks that way simply because it’s a little flattened, a little easier. Eventually the path becomes broad, smooth and permanent: like a thing that has always been there. But look carefully among the trees or the gorse, and you may faintly see the lost beginnings of other paths, paths that through an accumulation of little chances and choices were never made.

  So with the life that did not happen for John Shakespeare. And, perhaps, his son.

  No time, besides, for the gift of gloves, with a wedding by licence: skip the banns, hurry it through. Two friends of Bartholomew’s put up money as a surety – meaning, if the groom isn’t serious, he’ll be held to account for it, oh, yes. Stratford is, intermittently, diverted by it all. No end to Master Shakespeare’s troubles, they say. Some moralise, or in other words gloat – remembering his remarkable marriage to an Arden, his dizzy rise, and then the wool-dealing and rumours and murkiness and fall: so, here’s the Shakespeare name stumbling a little more, probably to fall at last from the ranks of the foremost, from the possibility of a coat of arms, of a Sir somewhere along the next generation or two. It has happened before. Across Warwickshire men hack at ditches on land their great-grandfather might have owned. Altogether, it is not a great matter for anyone who talks about it, set against this quarter’s rent that must be paid, the little sickly son whose vast eyes say he won’t live, the chimney-fire that has disrupted the workshop.

  Master Field stops Will in the street the day before the wedding, shakes his hand. ‘Marriage,’ he pronounces, somewhere between congratulation and condolence, ‘is a blessed and solemn state for the Christian man and woman.’ Rumour murmurs that lately the respectable house in Middle Row resounds with nocturnal fighting, and that once Mistress Field locked him out of doors. Will thinks of Richard in London: pictures him setting up type in a dark print-shop ringed by roof upon roof. Setting up, character by careful character, the text of his future. But love, surely, can be an opportunity too.

  We must be everything to one another. We will be. We must be. We must be, and we will. So it goes in his mind, until it’s like the game of hands he played as a child with Joan, one hand atop hers then hers atop his and faster and faster until you could hardly tell which was which. And now his hand covers Anne’s, as they stand together in the church at Temple Grafton to which no procession of musicians has accompanied them. Anne wears her hair loose for the last time, before marriage binds and conceals, and it seems to Will that he has never truly seen its magnificence before, its beautiful unlikelihood. Each tress round her face has a precise hang and spring, like peel descending from an apple. They stand in the sight of God and a dozen mortals, breathing cold, damp November in their responses. A single shaft of light falls slantwise from the narrow window, looking both solid and temporary, like something propped there for now, soon to be taken away, sawn up. And between two calls of a crow from the churchyard, they are made man and wife.

  Now the path through the wood takes shape. Anne will return with Will to live as his wife beneath his father’s roof, and there the child will be born and the new generation raised among the leather and the account-rolls, and that path takes such a definite direction and the ground is so clear it’s difficult to see how any other way could ever be taken. There would have to be, surely, hacking and burning.

  And Anne: she experiences a happiness that is at once startling, pure and complex, as if an icicle should form into a love-knot. Forsaking all other keep thee only unto her. That is what Will is going to do – sh
e believes and trusts it, which is the exactness of her love – and it is so wonderfully definitive that the unsatisfactory falls away, the haste and the bond, the roundness of her belly and the emptiness of the church.

  This spirit even seems to infect Bartholomew, who has been dour and hunched all day, swinging the purse containing her dowry like a weapon, frowning at the wedding-ring, which he considers a popish trinket. Service over, wine uncorked and handed round the church, he brightens and broadens, shaking hands and slapping shoulders. And so perhaps when it happens he doesn’t mean it, and it is just ill luck the way it comes out.

  ‘Well, Anne,’ he says, embracing her, ‘you caught him in time.’ And says it just as Will turns, and hears.

  4

  Love’s Metamorphosis (1587)

  Entering his fourteenth year, Ben grabbed the strap from his stepfather’s hand one humid midsummer eve and did as he had long ago promised.

  Ben hit him informatively, as it were, rather than vengefully – just clearing things up; and the man took it pretty well. He even invited Ben to the alehouse with him the next evening. ‘Now we are men together,’ he said. Ben went, just the once. It was interesting to see the fuss the man liked to make around himself, with his own fireside chair and polished tankard, and everyone treating him as an oracle. He confided to Ben, after the fourth pot, that he aimed to be nothing less than Master of the Worshipful Company of Tilers and Bricklayers.

  Ben nodded thoughtfully: not so much at that, for he found his stepfather’s bristling stupidity no more attractive with its soft belly turned up, as at the experience of drinking. He greatly liked what the ale did to him, and wondered if he might come to like it too much. But he still rose at five the next morning, doused his head under the street pump, and read Horace as he walked to school, feeling none the worse. He suspected that drink might indeed be an ally and resource against what he could see was coming to him.

  ‘If there were any other way,’ his mother said. She had turned notably bony now, brisk, to the point: always like someone measuring out emotional rations. ‘But there isn’t enough money for the university. So, you must have a trade. And it makes no sense paying a prentice premium to another master, when you can stay at home and learn a trade for nothing.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed, ‘it makes no sense.’

  Master Camden’s great history was published. Britannia. Tremblingly Ben turned over the great folio leaves in the master’s study. Not appropriate for him, a non-Queen’s Scholar, to be here, but it didn’t much matter now, as he was leaving Westminster School.

  ‘But this is magnificent. It must make your fame.’

  Master Camden frowned in modesty. ‘It has attracted favourable notice. My lord Burghley has been especially kind. All I can see now are its imperfections.’

  Ben shook his head. ‘There has never been anything writ like it. Yet you’re staying here.’

  ‘Schoolmastering, yes. Does that surprise you?’

  ‘No, because you are the best of teachers. Yes, because – well…’ He was going to say if it was me. If it was me presenting my great work to the public, I would not carry on quietly teaching grammar in an old monk’s cell, I would shout to the skies. ‘There’s a world out there.’

  ‘Which I may visit a little during the vacations, and which may very well soon tire of me. Meanwhile I will hope to teach other such pupils as you.’

  ‘Ah, but to what end?’ Ben closed the volume and rested his hands on the panelled calf cover. Books, he had noticed, were warmer than any other inanimate objects. ‘Never fear, that’s the last of my self-pity.’

  ‘You need never stop learning, Benjamin. As long as you can read, as long as you can lay your hand on a book. Which reminds me. These are for you.’

  Half a dozen volumes, ready bound in a satchel. The names shimmered and danced for him:Virgil, Plautus. ‘I can’t take those.’

  ‘No? It would please me. Call them borrowed, if you prefer. As I said, I am staying at Westminster, and your apprenticeship will doubtless keep you hereabout. We shall still, I hope, be friends.’

  ‘So I hope,’ Ben said, and smiled, and accepted the books. And thought: The kingdom’s finest historical scholar, and Ben Jonson the bricklayer, friends. Very pretty. Very unlikely. He saw Master Camden’s eye stray to the fresh heap of correspondence on his desk, sealing-wax clustering and drooping, erudite fruit. He did not exactly want Ben to go, but once he did go there would be much to occupy him, he would turn brightly to it, necessarily forgetting. And somehow it was this that made Ben say: ‘I don’t regret it, you know. The way I faced the examiners. They looked haughty on me, yet I knew almost as much Latin as they did. I wouldn’t bend. And I never will bend, you see, when I know I’m in the right.’

  Master Camden seemed about to say something, then shook his head, and smiled sadly. Probably the sad smile meant: You will change. But Master Camden, though Ben esteemed him more than anyone in the world, did not really know him. No one did, which Ben found acceptable enough: he knew himself. And that was the first principle, after all, behind all the greatest thinking of the ancients: know thyself. Strange, he thought, that so few people could manage it.

  ‘Spare me all that stuff about teaching me the art and mystery of thy trade,’ Ben said to his stepfather, on the first day. ‘Just show me what I have to do.’ He looked up at the long ladders, the scaffolding, and realised he had no fear of falling.

  * * *

  Consider the events of a single day – no, much less. About as much time as it takes to roast a fowl on a spit.

  Time enough to change a man – and, perhaps, the world.

  The place: well, two places, fifty miles apart, linked by consequence. One is the Oxfordshire market town of Thame, amply straddling the London road, a wool-rich burgher town, prepared to lay out good money if it gets good value – as it did earlier this day with a performance by the most estimable of touring theatre troupes, the Queen’s Men.

  They pitched up in White Hound Close, and to a large, appreciative crowd played The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, and now at the Spread Eagle they feed, drink and tally. They have bespoken the whole supper-room for themselves: no rowsy ragged rabblement these, they are the Queen’s Men, put together from the choicest players of several companies to bear Her Majesty’s name about the country and to play before her at the Court. The Queen, when cares of state are laid aside, dearly loves a play, and is proud to own it: a blow, then, to the Puritan haters of the stage, though not a silencing one.

  ‘Sweet sound.’ The Dutton brothers, red-bearded and foxy, tip the jingling contents of the box on to the table. William Knell, tall and florid, masterful player of kings, watches. Not happy. Snatches up a coin. Bites, bends.

  ‘Bastards. Bloody cheating bumpkins.’

  ‘Hush, man, you’re not on stage now,’ says Jack Towne. His fair, long-limbed handsomeness is still notable: a groove between the brows, though, as if it can only be maintained with effort. ‘Mine host will hear you.’

  ‘Pox on him. And on thieving Thame. The men are clods. The women all ugly.’

  ‘Naturally they are. You’re not drunk enough.’ Tarlton, the snub-nosed clown, pours. ‘Wine, the transformer. A glass, and you’ll be commending the men’s wit and the women’s beauty. Another glass, and you’ll be commending t’other way round.’

  Jack Towne’s eyes narrow at that. Not perhaps in mirth. But Knell rounds on him. ‘Don’t you smirk. Never mind mine host hearing, Towne, look to your damned audience. Your voice failed. By the end, nothing but croaking.’ He rasps in scornful imitation. ‘“Why then belike, all that I have here is yours.” Pitiful. Not piteous.’ The bumper of wine goes down, gulp. ‘Give me more.’

  Tarlton pours. ‘When you play the flatterer you quite turn my head. Water with it?’

  ‘Save your jester turn for the Court.’

  ‘What in God’s name is wrong with you?’ John Dutton stacks coins. ‘They liked us. Takings twice what we got in Beaconsfield
. Why so foul?’

  ‘I need some air.’ Knell gets up from the table, goes to open the single window. It yields reluctantly, squeaking and grinding. The room sucks in a little scented summer. ‘Bloody town. Did you mark it? Church here. Grammar school next. Dunghill there. And so with every dreary hole we have to drag ourselves to ’twixt now and September.’ He throws a backward glance. Bloodshot eye falls on Towne. ‘Well, why do you stare? You’re always the first to mourn when we leave London gates.’

  ‘That’s why I stare. I am usurped. Take away a man’s cherished miseries, and what do you leave him?’

  ‘Come, come, friends, at least we have a proper equipage. When I was first with Leicester’s men, we made the tour with a villainous old cart and worse mule.’ This is Robert Wilson, wit and scholar of the company: elegant, watering his wine, acute grey eyes taking in everybody, everything. ‘Laid bets on which would founder first. Singer, you were with Leicester’s then, weren’t you?’

  Anecdote springs up all round the table. Towne slips away from it to join Knell at the window.

  ‘Come, Knell, what cheer?’ Tentatively he pats the big shoulder turned to him. ‘You can tell me. All the years betwixt us, now companions, now not. Storms and havens. Hast heart-pain? Share. Trust me, I can deal wisdom to beat any gammer winking over her turf fire.’

  ‘Go your ways, Towne,’ he growls.

  Towne shrugs, walks back to the table, pours a drink. Tarlton calls for another bottle, Wilson for pasties; the Duttons scoop the money into pouches; a moth as big as a field mouse blunders in and flirts dangerously with the candles, and in less than an hour there will be a dead man.