The Diary of William Shakespeare, Gentleman

To Bryan,
a gentle man

Today I sat in church, William Shakespeare, gentleman, groom of His Gracious Majesty King James, God rest his soul, dressed in my red velvet coat, red silk stockings and ruby rings, the red livery of King James, and I a King's Man still, owner of the second-largest house in all the district, with five invitations to dine this midday, including from my Lord Sheriff, none of which I could accept as the river has risen once again, and the rain falls still, straight as candles and as hard.

Outside, autumn's frosty fingers stroked the air and fringed the trees with gold. But how can this be autumn when once again no summer cared to visit us? That weary traveller, the sun, has fled south with the birds, to find less fickle warmth. Skies and men weep for its loss.

It was in such a mildewed autumn that Ned's parents sold him to the travelling players. I was eight, and he was ten. He was my friend.

And suddenly I was a child again and tears were cold diamonds on my cheeks. Is this old age, when a memory is more real than the musty crowd in church, and ancient pain stabs like a rapier?

But a gentleman does not weep in church, especially not a gentleman as newly made as myself. I brushed away my tears before I stepped from our church box. My wife followed me in her black velvet and lace cap, as befits the wife of the richest gentleman in Stratford, and then my daughter Judith, in yellow silk laced too tight, her bosom like two puppies straining to escape their basket.

Outside, I smiled at our neighbours and bowed to the squire as my man Jem gave alms to No Eye Sue and Billy Grunter, the beggars. I climbed into my chair, for the mud sits deep for the carriage, and though it is little distance from our home to church, a gentleman's family cannot wear pattens on their feet to keep above the muck.

My wife and daughter shared the second chair. Judith pretended not to see the glances of the louts and farmers, but twitched up her skirts so they could admire her ankles. I kept the curtains closed on the way home to shut out autumn and its cold.

But memory is a savage tiger. Loose him from his cage and he snarls until he tires. There behind the curtains of my chair I was a boy again, son of the glove-maker who dreamt of changing his estate to ‘gentleman' and so sent his eldest son to grammar school. I was about to meet a friend.

School is free for any boy in England, but most lads work or starve. The others at our grammar school were merchants' or yeoman farmers' sons. They thought themselves too high to know a glover's son, even one whose father was bailiff of the council.

That morning the usher had beaten me for trying to write words, while the boys in the corner giggled.

‘A common man may read,' the usher shouted, his willow stick beating each word into my hands, ‘but only
scriveners and high-born folk need write more than their names! Do you hear me, boy? Writing dulls the memory. It is not for thee!'

‘Yes, sir,' I mumbled, trying not to cry. ‘I'll never write again! I promise, sir!'

My hands were swollen when we were let out at eleven of the clock to go home for dinner. I stumbled through the trees, holding my hands in my armpits, trying to stop the pain.

‘That won't help,' said a voice.

I looked around. ‘Who said that?'

‘Me.' A boy jumped down from a tree, chicken-boned, fair-skinned, red-haired, brown-freckled, an owl's egg in each hand. I had seen him in class for the first time that morning, though he seemed the same age as me. ‘I'm Ned, Farmer Forrest's son.'

Farmer Forrest had a small farm further up the river, not much larger than the fields that had come to Father with my mother's dowry. It must have been a good harvest the past year, for Farmer Forrest to spare his son to go to school. ‘I'm Will Shakespeare.'

‘I know. Your father made my mother's gloves. That was before I was born,' he added, ‘but Ma has the gloves still.'

‘Good gloves last not one life but two,' I said. It was one of Father's favourite sayings. I took my hands out of my armpits to pretend I didn't mind the pain, and anyway Ned was right — it hadn't helped.

‘You need bracken juice,' Ned said.

‘What for?'

‘To stop your hands hurting.' He put the owl eggs down carefully, then broke off a dozen young bracken fronds. ‘Hold out your hands.'

I held them out as obediently as if Ned had been the schoolmaster. The juice was cold as he squeezed it on. The pain stopped.

‘Is it magic?' I asked warily. An old woman at Clopton had been stoned as a witch the winter before.

Ned's grin seemed to light the world. ‘No magic. Calf's stomach turns milk to cheese. Bracken juice stops pain. And oak sap will toughen your hands so a caning won't hurt as much. Here, I'll show you.'

He found a stone and scrubbed it against an oak tree, then rubbed the brown sap onto my palms. It made them brown too.

I looked at my hands doubtfully. ‘Will oak sap really make them tougher?'

‘Yes.' Ned said it so steadily I believed him. Nor did he ever lie in all the time I knew him. ‘But it will stain them too.'

‘Oh. Mother will think I haven't washed my hands for dinner.'

‘Say you've been peeling walnuts.' He shook a walnut tree, then handed me a couple of unripe ones. ‘Here. Peel them, and it will be true.' His grin grew wicked. ‘Shall we put dried nettles in the usher's hat? Or slugs, maybe?'

I grinned back. ‘Both.'

I peeled the nuts, then cracked the shells. The insides were soft. I ate one and gave him the other, happier than I had ever known. My hands had stopped hurting, but it was more than that. I had a friend.

We never did put slugs in the usher's hat. But for one year all of Stratford and its lands were ours — watching the hawks fly to find their nests; sneaking out at night to see which barns the owls flew from. Once Ned braved an eagle's nest, and shared the eggs with me.

One bright year of friendship, when all the world was hope. We would learn Latin, we told each other solemnly, and go to university when we were fourteen, to make us gentlemen, the first of our families to be so high. Then we'd hire ourselves as a pair of tutors to take rich men's sons to Italy, where Ned said women wore bright silks and showed their bosoms, or to Africa, where men had black faces, even the kings. That would earn us money to buy a ship. We'd be privateers and steal treasure from the King of Spain and be rich enough for chamber pots of gold.

We even half believed it.

‘The Queen will make you Lord William of Stratford,' said Ned, ‘for bringing her a sapphire as big as a heron's egg. And I will be Earl of Forrest.'

‘Why should you be an earl and I only a lord?'

Ned grinned. ‘Because I find bigger eggs, so I will find Her Majesty bigger jewels as well. Your sister Joan can marry me if she likes, and we'll be brothers.'

I laughed. We were brothers already, and needed no marriage to make it so.

That whole year seemed spring. I remember roasting chestnuts at the tinker's fire when we should have been at school, and sliding down a snowy bank on our mothers' trays. Surely that was winter? But I do not remember cold, nor even damp, only gold gleams through a roof of leaves, Ned laughing as we caught minnows in the streams or shot rooks with catapults.

I do not remember even autumn's chill till one morning I came back from school for dinner and found an alderman in our hall, standing by the fire with my father.

My life changed forever on that day, and so did Ned's. Our winter came at last.

That was more than forty years ago. Forty years and more since Ned was sold, and yet I remembered that, and not that Parson Roger would dine with us this midday until my wife reminded me.

If memory is tiger's fangs, then Parson Roger is the breath of boiled cabbage, wholesome, but not a place to linger. His conversation is as cabbage-like as his sermons. Yet his were the only words I had for companions at my dinner, for my wife said nothing I had not heard a thousand times, and mostly about her teeth, which hurt, but which she will not have the surgeon pull. My daughter sulked because I ordered her to cover her bosom with a shawl. She sulked still at supper, but as her words rarely be of interest, we did not miss them.

Words were my chief love, once. How could the poor usher know I would make my fortune writing words, as others make their coin with ships of silk or spices? For years my London friends and I fenced with words as swordsmen flash their rapiers — before I burnt my books to become at last the gentleman my father longed for.

This rough magic,

I here abjure
, I said, not realising the treasure that I thrust away.
I'll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth.

And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I'll drown my books.

Men keep their station. A blacksmith hammers as a blacksmith, a duke keeps his duchy, except by order of the King or God. Few men have had so many lives as I. I have been glove-maker, player, playwright, gentleman. I have played kings and ghosts. I have been a lover too, on the stage and off it.

A player's pleasures:

To be a king by dinner time,

A knight by night, shaking his spear.

My spear ready in darkness and in light.

Ah, good nights, that had spring's treasures in them.

So many lives. So many words. Kings die, but words upon the page live after those who write them.

Yet words are tools, like a blacksmith's forge and hammer. A gentleman must not use tools, but live upon his estate, upon the rents of his farms, the church tithe he has purchased, the barley in his granaries. A gentleman has an agent to write his letters for him, as my agent does for me.

But words can no more leave me than stars can sail from the sky. Words whisper wicked wit through dinner's gossip that Stratford's fools would blink at. Words dance my firefly mind to blazes every night, come laughing at me in my dreams, tempting me like a mistress who powders her bosom white. I can no more live without my words than forgo my meat and bread.

And so at last, as night soaks up the day, I take my pen again, the candles flickering in my library. Once more I become that partnership of Will and Quill as I remember the councilman, and poor Ned, and that morning when our summer froze into a winter of discontent indeed.

But this, my diary, is for my last audience, of one. I will keep it under the mattress of our second-best bed, where none will find it and snigger, and say Master Shakespeare is still at heart a craftsman, plying words.

In a few minutes, the only woman in all England I may lawfully mount will plod up the stairs. I will put down my quill and climb the stairs to our bedroom with glass at its windows, to our feather bed with its red velvet
hangings, warmed by our servants with hot bricks. The bootboy will creep in during the night to keep our fire blazing and the room warm.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow, I will take up my pen once more. I will write of the alderman, and how he slashed our lives that day, of the day that they sold Ned, of the loves that tore my spring and summer heart, not in case those memories leave me, but because in this, the autumn of my life, they taunt me still. Perhaps, locked on the page, the memories will fade, as the usher said.

I will write of household matters too, that I might refer back to them. My mind is sound still, but if it is true that each word a man writes is one less he will remember, then one day my plays will haunt me, vile ghosts sucking out my past. This book will be my memory too, when my mind's winter comes at last.

So this was today's dinner then, a record of this year's produce of our garden and estate: a fat goose, stuffed, with quince sauce; a lamb's-head pie; a dish of turnips, buttered; a blancmange of chicken and almonds — soft meat for my wife's bad teeth; a paste of apples; a dish of raisins of the sun. Second course: roast veal, brought in rent by my tenant farmer who supplies us with meat instead of coin; a soft beef brawn; sea bream and eel pasties, the last from our fish pond; frumenty; a compote of boiled green apples, for mine is the best orchard in the county, with trees from France and from the Low Countries; scraped cheese with sage and sugar, with the first of our October ale to drink, the product of our brewhouse.

An excellent dinner. Would that the conversation had been as good.

Supper was pottage spiced with French wine and saffron, a chicken jelly, damson tarts, a green cheese herbed, and bread of our own wheat baking. I will have no broken meats left from dinner for my supper, nor do our servants dine on them. Each afternoon the poor gather at our back door, and the broken meats are given to them, as befits the household of a gentleman.

The parson stayed for supper too, for he would not get as good at his own hearth. The clock struck six before he left. Yet as I spooned my chicken jelly I remembered when I ate three meals a day, breakfasting on brown bread and ale like any axeman, and thought a slice of rabbit pie the finest dinner in the world.

My mood being low, I did check my library chamber pot tonight, and will check my bedroom chamber pot each morning now. My son-in-law, good Dr Hall, assures me that the health of a man can be judged by the contents of his chamber pot, and at my age it is wise to note the changes. I must tell my wife to inform the servants not to remove it, until I have inspected it.

My waters were clear today, of good colour, as befits a man who may be full in years but is still full of vigour, but my bowels lie uneasy, which may be from sad memory, but more likely from the quince at midday dinner. Quince may aid digestion at the end of a fine meal, but it stirs the bowels and stomach if taken at its beginning. I will tell my wife I must avoid it.