The Diary of William Shakespeare, Gentleman (11 page)

Dinner: a pie of pollock; a pike, stewed then roasted; a mess of crab and parsnips, John Robinson sending fresh fish to us each week, that we may not rely on local fishmongers during the Advent fast; raisin cakes; an almond syllabub, of which I am most fond; a jelly of elderberries in sugar with seaweed; a soup of mushrooms with almond cream; Advent pottage
of lentils, for those that wanted it; rhubarb stewed in cider, apples only slightly withered, of which we have good store; walnuts. The ale was of fresh brewing and very good. We do not have supper, for to keep the fast, but my wife brought me ale and manchet bread to sop in it as I write here.

Bowels: stopped by the travelling, but no doubt the Advent fare will loosen them. Waters clear.

Today we dined at the squire's. My wife wore her green silk gown and yellow sleeves; I in my red stockings, my silk cloak lined with white fur, and new high hat, a fashion I brought back from London. The conversation began with comments about the good weather, and that was where it ended too. I have scarce had a dinner so dull.

The squire's son added nothing to the conversation except a long report of the health of one of his hounds. I thought Judith might have pined for him, he being a man and unmarried, but she contented herself most politely with his sister, Rosamund. I was glad, for though the youth would be a goodly match, I have decided that if it is Bess he loves, and she loves him, why should they not have each other?

I asked him for their privy closet, and he politely took me there.

‘Sir,' I said, for I was bored and wished to stir the plot, ‘I see you often from my library window, attendant at the smithy.'

He blushed, a fair-faced boy. ‘Why, sir, I have ordered new gates as a gift for my good father,' he began.

‘You make eyes at the smith's good daughter, sir,' I said.

He stammered something.

I smiled. ‘I will send you a gift tomorrow. Make use of it.'

‘A gift, sir?'

‘A gift of flowers for your mother to thank her, and a book of sonnets too. Please read it carefully.'

‘In truth, sir, I am not a reader —'

‘Read it and learn it!' I said. ‘Honeyed phrases will trap the prey you seek.'

Even this lad had wit enough to understand. He gulped. ‘I thank you, sir.'

‘I thank you,' I said, and made my way into the privy.

He thought, perhaps, I meant for conveying me thus, but my gratitude is for enlivening a dinner that stretched as far as the Lethe, and days I spend at my window bored.

I had not thought upon it before, how truly bored I am; this book indeed my only Stratford friend, my London friends too far away in station and in space.

Dinner: a pike, roasted, with apple sauce; blancmange of almond cream and stockfish; and fish again disguised to seem a saddle of mutton, so well my wife exclaimed; eels; a dish of spinach; a saffron pottage. Second course: a salmon, dressed in sorrel sauce, but not as well as my wife cooks it; almond cakes, dry; a compote of preserved cherries and apricots. Third course: a jelly I thought was mulberry, and did not guess was quince till I had ate it; olives; raisins of the sun; a pie of oysters and herring, which looked fine and tasted odd.

Bowels: exceedingly loose, a victim of the pie or quince. Waters clear.

A poor sermon, once again. I wore my velvet cloak, not my fur-lined one, for the weather continues warm.

The squire's son kissed young Bess's hand in front of all outside the church, though not in sight of his own parents, who observe the Sabbath in their chapel.

I glanced towards the smith. He frowned. A squire's son may be a son-in-law of high estate, but great estate is of little use when one has a thriving smithy and no sons.

Thomas Quiney did bow to us, but I inclined my head only and did not return the bow. I kept my eye sternly upon Judith, but was relieved to see she kept her eyes down, as a maid should, and did not encourage him.

Susanna and Dr Hall to dine, a full family board.

I wondered if the squire's son had read my book yet, and if he had chosen words to win his Bess this afternoon.

Words made my fortune all those years ago, but not the words I penned in love and anguish, the candle spluttering at the night. The words that found me gold were as accidental as a trip on the stairs.

I had expected the inn yard to be crowded at the prospect of the play. But a larger company had played in Stratford but two weeks before, at the guildhall. Three
players and a handcart must have seemed poor stuff after five players and a performing bear. The old soaks sat on their usual benches, and a few families on stools. The innkeeper looked resigned: all this fuss and little more ale to sell.

I slipped two pennies into the money-box, found a stool and put down the cushions I had brought from home, and handed Anne down. She nodded pleasantly to neighbours, then sat, her hands on her lap, to see the show.

Some companies begin with a flourish of trumpets or a roll of drums. This afternoon, Richard merely strode out of the inn door, dressed in moth-chewed black satin, a doublet, stockings. He needed no drums, only a gong, for the energy of his presence quietened all tongues.

‘
List, O list!
' he cried.

‘
For something is rotten in the state of Denmark now.

My father not two months dead,

My mother married to my uncle.

But hark, my uncle comes!
'

He paused. The audience stared at the door, and then the path that led around to the privy, then at the door again.

No uncle.

‘
My uncle comes!
' yelled Richard. He stared at the inn door, which still
showed a disturbing absence of uncle, King and poisoner. ‘
See!
' cried
Richard, louder. ‘
See how he comes.
'

The door opened. The innkeeper's wife appeared, carrying a tray of tankards. Someone giggled.

The crowd began to mutter, cracking walnuts. Someone laughed.

Richard's grimness might have been that of a Danish Prince robbed of his throne, or an actor suddenly cast
adrift by his company. Perhaps only I saw the glimpse also of a young man casting about for words and clutching at what he may.

‘
Ah, such evil we have known
,' he said, with only the smallest glint of
desperation.

‘
For here, by Denmark's throne,

Is . . . is evil blessed . . .

Evil indeed an honoured guest

More even indeed than all the rest.
'

I wondered how long he could keep it up.

‘Pardon,' I whispered to Anne, and slipped around the crowd and along the privy path to the back door.

‘What is —' I began, then saw the cause exactly. Poor Matthew was head down in a bucket, losing all the sausages of earlier in the day and much else besides, while young Rob frantically sponged vomit off his dress.

Outside, Richard still harangued the crowd on the evils of the new King of Denmark.

The muse of fire visited me then. For it was not I who grabbed a sheet from where it was airing by the tavern fire, who draped it over my body, covering my face, who found his way out through the front door blinded by the sheet, though to be sure I had been out and in an inn all of my life. Not I who ignored the titters — for a man in a sheet is simply a man in a sheet until he roars:

‘
I am thy father's ghost! Mark me!
'

I whirled, as if staring sightless at the crowd — and heard it then. Heard nothing, which is the chief applause for any actor. Not a breath, nor a crack of a walnut shell.

‘
Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned?
' cried Richard.

A small part of me smiled that Richard was so quick to take up my part. But most of me was focused on my words, my slow, old man's voice. Even, perhaps, my father's.

‘
I am he who was King, father, royal Dane.
'

I changed my voice to a hoarse, dark roar; changed my accent to copy our local Lord when he read the lesson on feast days at church. I took a deeper breath and thundered:

‘
Now I will tell you why

My canonised bones, hearsed in death,

Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre,

Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws,

To cast me up again.
'

‘
Tell me! Tell me!
' entreated Richard. ‘
Why has your dead corpse made
night so hideous? Why shake the disposition of our souls?
'

‘
Mark me!
' I shrieked, trying to think what might come next. I hoped
Richard might come up with a good long speech to let me think.

‘
Father, I will
,' said Richard.

As short a speech as possible. Marry, this was Richard's play, not mine! But already the words tumbled out upon themselves:

‘
My hour is almost come,

When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames

Must render up myself.
'

‘
Alas, poor ghost!
' mourned Richard, managing three whole new words, curse
him.

‘
Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing

To what I shall unfold
,' I groaned.

‘
Speak
,' entreated Richard. ‘
I am bound to hear.
'

No more to and froing. We must get to the meat of the matter now. My mind worked harder than the smith's bellows.

‘
I
am thy father's spirit,

Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night

And for the day confined to fast in fires

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away.

But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison-house,

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,

Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres.
'

I heard a small shriek from the audience. I almost smiled under my sheet. And suddenly words flowed faster than new ale from the barrel.

‘
List, list, O, list!

If thou didst ever thy dear father love,

Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.
'

‘
Murder!
' shouted Richard. ‘
Dost thou say murder?
'

‘
Murder most foul
,' I answered. ‘
But this is worst.

This the offence greatest in this world,

Most foul, strange and unnatural.
'

‘
Tell me!
' cried Richard, at last managing to add something useful.
‘
That I may haste with wings as swift as thoughts of love, may sweep to your
revenge.
'

I lowered my voice to a whisper, drunk on words, in love with words, letting free every word pinched and confined within my teeming mind:

‘
Now, Hamblet, hear:

'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,

A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark

Is by a forged process of my death

Rankly abused: but know, thou noble youth,

The serpent that did sting thy father's life

Now wears his crown.
'

‘
O my prophetic soul! My uncle?
' cried Richard.

I kept my voice to a ghostly croak:

‘
Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,

With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts —

O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power

So to seduce! — won to his shameful lust

The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen!
'

I was in full flight now, my muse carrying me on wings, soaring above the tavern crowd, above all Stratford, higher than I had ever known.

‘
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
,' I cried triumphantly.

‘
A couch for luxury and damned incest.

Ah, lust will sate itself in a celestial bed,

And prey on garbage.

O, Hamblet, what a falling-off was there!

From me, whose love was of that dignity —
'

‘
But hark!
' interrupted Richard, as someone knocked a frantic signal inside
the inn door. ‘
My uncle comes! Murderous, lustful villain!

Dear ghost, you must away.

Ere the hot breath of the new day

Shall drag you further to your doom.
'

I had a night sky full of winking star words still to give them. Yet I let his
hands guide me back to the inn door. I slipped inside, just as Matthew's voice began
what I hoped was close to their prepared speech. ‘
What now, nephew?
'

I took off my sheet. Young Rob gazed at me with awe.

‘I have never known the like,' he whispered. ‘Have you . . . have you really met a ghost, sir? Heard one speak so awfully?'

‘No.' Suddenly I was trembling. What had happened out there?

I know that muse now. It is a craft sailed by the imagination of the audience. The player and the playwright just give wind to fill its sails. Even a bad player can spark a flame for all men love a story. A great one turns sizzling embers into snickering flames that burn away all unbelief.

Young Rob still stared at me, in his damp silk gown. ‘But the words you said . . .'

‘Words come to me like leaves upon a springtime tree,' I said wearily. ‘Will Matthew be able to play the rest?'

‘I think so, sir,' said Rob. ‘And I have got my dress clean.' He sniffed. ‘Unless you get too close to it.'

‘Good.'

I made my way out the back door, and round through the audience again, trying to look like a man who has been to the privy. But no one saw me. They were in the hand of the play now. Even I, who had been so shortly part of it, was soon caught within its mystery. For the words Richard spoke now had power, as the ones in the field this morning never had. Truly, the muse had flown above this inn this afternoon.

Another hour and the play was done; the ground splodged with blood that looked like plum jam, which the dogs would have licked up by evening. Yet even after the actors took their final bows, the audience hardly spoke, except one man who called as they vanished into the inn again, ‘Will you play again tomorrow?'

A head peered out of the inn door — Richard's, now with his cap and not the Prince's crown. ‘Which play? For we have many.'

‘This one,' cried Meg the alewife.

‘Ay, this one! Again! Again!' The cries went round the forecourt.

‘Of course,' babbled Richard. For the first time that day I saw him at a loss. But no player will refuse another performance when the audience demand it, and have pennies in their pocket to see it done. ‘This play, again. Just as it were this afternoon.' He met my eye. ‘Hist! William!'

I nodded to him, then turned to Anne. ‘I will stay and drink awhile, if you do not mind walking home alone.'

‘Of course,' she said pleasantly and walked up to a woman friend, a neighbour of her father's farm, and took her arm.

I made my way around the back of the inn again, where there was a private parlour. I tipped the innkeeper my last penny to take it, and bade him tell Richard where I was. The players joined me before the innkeeper had time to ask me my choice of drink.

Richard waved at him. ‘Your best ale, landlord. And a bottle of your brandy too.'

‘Richard,' I said quietly, ‘I have no more coin to pay for it.'

He grinned at me. ‘But we have. The money-box will give us all we need for drink and bed and meat tonight — though not sausages. And tomorrow we may have to break three money-boxes to get to our coin.

‘What say you?' he asked Matthew. ‘We can give them two performances, if we begin early. Threepence entrance standing, and sixpence for a seat?'

‘They will pay it,' said Matthew. He still looked pale, and slightly shocked too. ‘Sir,' he said to me, ‘why did you not say you were a player? And playwright too?'

‘Because I am not one. I scribble, 'tis all.'

‘What scribble that must be,' murmured Richard. ‘But you can do it all again?'

‘What? Me? Tomorrow?'

‘But of course!' Richard gestured at the other two. ‘Think you that Rob can play the ghost like that? Besides, he must appear to dally with the King, and then a quick change to be the Scottish Princess. It must be you, no other. And no other could do it,' he added. ‘Nor could I remember your words to write them down,' he grinned, ‘being somewhat occupied when I heard them.'

‘I can write you more words, sirs, not just those. Words of such clash and passion that the audience will shriek and groan.'

‘You think well of yourself, Master Shakespeare.' But Matthew said it with a smile.

‘We would be grateful for your words,' said Richard quietly. ‘And gladder yet if you will say them.'

It was impossible. I was my father's apprentice, a citizen. Not a player. I risked the town mocking me and all my family. ‘There goes Will Shakespeare, who one day decided he would add ghost to his business, as well as glover's apprentice.'