The Diary of William Shakespeare, Gentleman (14 page)

My wife would have me send to London for sweetmeats and sugar subtleties that our kitchen cannot prepare, such as we had for Susanna's wedding. Judith dreams of marzipan bride and groom and wedding guests, and sugar plates and cups.

‘Shall we have a marzipan tavern then, to honour the groom?' I said. ‘With drunken guests, and others throwing up inside his privy?'

Judith looked like she would argue, but my wife laid her hand upon my arm.

‘Thomas loves her, and she him. Is that not enough? You who have writ of love so much,' she smiled, ‘and loved too, surely you can forgive love now?'

I had no heart to berate my wife. Not one shrewish word in all our years; and if she had failed to have a care for her daughter's virtue now, then so had I.

‘Marzipan it may be, good wife, but only what your nimble fingers can create. Have you forgot it will be in Lent, this wedding?'

‘But marzipan is made of almonds —'

I held up my hand. ‘And sugar, which is a luxury, which is why it must be brought from London, not our
market here. Scandal enough to have a wedding in Lent, but we cannot feed its fire with sugar.'

Judith's face fell. ‘No sucking pig? No boar's head or ox roast for our tenants?'

I stared at them, wondering what they had been planning. We had not roasted an ox even for her sister's wedding. ‘It must be a Lenten feast.'

‘You could pay for the dispensation,' Judith pleaded. ‘Gentlemen are not bound like commoners, especially at a feast.'

‘I can, but I will not. It is the duty of a gentleman and a lord of his own household to know what is fitting. And a sucking pig in Lent would not be.'

‘Even for Master Shakespeare?' Judith began again.

‘Especially,' I said, ‘for he.'

I looked at my wife's face. I almost thought she might cry, she who never cried. What had she been arranging and ordering that might be wasted now?

‘Let us have another feast,' I offered, ‘afore Lent begins. We will call it a Feast of the Family. And you, my wife, may serve the sucking pig, the boar's head and the gilded tusks, the marzipan figures, all that you desire.' And if Quiney must be at our table, at a family feast only Susanna and Dr Hall would be there to see him pile his trencher with my meats.

My wife rarely smiles, but when she does, it lights her face as a sudden candle in a darkened room. ‘You are the best of husbands, and the best of men.'

I smiled back. ‘A man, certainly.'

She came and kissed my cheek, a thing she also rarely does. ‘And it is for love,' she whispered. ‘We are old, husband. But do you remember?'

And so I came up here, to my book. Yes, I remember. Years do not fade the stain of sin.

The company I had joined left early that morn, the players well fed and rested in our hall on good feather mattresses free of fleas or lice, their clothes washed by my mother and my wife and dried overnight by the hall fire, then ironed. Both must have been up most of the night to make it so, with a screen so as not to wake the sleepers: pies a-baking and victuals harvested from our larder, cheeses and dried fruits and a giant pudding and much more, and a rabbit-fur lining sewn in my cloak lest I catch cold. (I was glad of that lining ere long.)

And so we set out, soon after the roosters crowed, discreetly taking the path that led away from the township, for players hefting their trunk on a barrow are not as grand as players in silk and velvet and a gilded crown.

I kissed my family, from the smallest to my wife, and then my father. He clung to my hand a moment. Had Ned's father clung to his son's and for a candle's flicker too, all those years ago? I wished I could tell my father that this was my life burst into flower, not servitude to stave off his disgrace. But to say that would be to insult the life he had strove to give me; the gentleman's life that by my own actions I have now.

My mother wiped her tears upon her apron, and my wife too. Susanna watched, trying to make sense of her mother's tears, her father's smile, while Judith looked distracted at a rooster who had escaped the pen and wandered about the garden.

Only my Hamnet bounced upon his toes as if his excitement was too big for his small body. ‘Will you bring me stories, Father?' He was but two years old then, but talking so well I knew my gift of words had sprung anew
in him. I felt the first pang that morning, that I would not be here to guide his words. But I had learnt my word craft without a father's hand, and so would he; and as a player, not bound to any master, I would be free too, to visit home, returning to its comforts, and my son.

I knelt, to meet his eyes. ‘I will bring you stories, and much more.'

‘What?' he asked solemnly.

‘Why, I do not know yet, for I've not seen London, nor the world. What do you wish for?'

‘An elephant,' he stated.

My father laughed. ‘How has the boy learnt of elephants?'

My son put his small hand in mine. ‘From Father. He said if I wish to stop elephants from charging, I must tie their tails together.'

I grinned. ‘I but told him a story from Pliny's book.' I turned to Hamnet again. ‘An elephant may be a trifle big for thee.'

‘Will, are you coming?' called Richard.

And so I left.

We walked. Young Rob began to sing, some tune he had picked up at the market. Half my mind was on my life ahead, half on the song, that I might weave it into the fabric of a play, for the lad's voice was sweet and clear. I had never heard singing in a play, but who was to say it could not be done? And it would give Rob pleasure to have a larger part even while his parts were still so small.

And then I saw the beech tree. I had not been there since my son and his sister had been born, for two babes in one house give no one much rest; and lately it had rained often, not a flood but enough to soften
any parchment left in a tree. But even through the green leaves I saw the flash of a red ribbon. Had Judyth decided to fare me well?

I paused, and said, ‘Excuse me, sirs,' and ducked under its branches.

Behind me Matthew said, ‘He must relieve himself already? His bladder must leak like Fleet Street.'

‘Nay, his wife's ale be too good. He will not drink so much when we are upon the road.'

The parchment was there, but wrapped in a bladder to keep it dry. I lifted it, unrolled it and read.

The quality of mercy is not strained.

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed:

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

'Tis mightiest in the mightiest. It becomes

The thronèd monarch better than his crown.

His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,

The attribute to awe and majesty

Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings,

But mercy is above this sceptred sway.

It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings.

It is an attribute to God himself.

And earthly power doth then show likest God's

When mercy seasons justice.

I stared. What did she mean? No words of love, no farewell. Or were they? Did she give me permission to leave her?

I looked more closely. The ink was dark, the bladder so old it cracked at my touch. This poem was not freshly writ last night, but left weeks or months or even years ago. This was no farewell gift.

And then I saw it was a gift of words that I might use, a gift of forgiveness too. For that, it seemed, Judyth had given me long before.

What girl was this, that I must leave behind?

I slipped the parchment in my sleeve and ducked back out, fastening my codpiece.

I joined in Rob's song, and singing we crossed the turnip fields, while I cast off my old life like a moth its prisoning cocoon.

Dinner: a hare, roasted; mutton, boiled, with egg sauce; a beef steak pudding with beet tops; Virginia potatoes with beef marrow sauce; a leg of kid in the Italian way; onions, pickled; suet pudding with raisins of the sun; tart of figs and apples; cheese with caraway; liquorice butter; biscuits with our crest; pears well kept in bran.

Bowels: strained, but waters again clear.

Today is one I would live entirely in the past; not here, where my son-in-law to be — son of a bedlam pig, more like, or like the boar whose head he ate — made free both of my table and my daughter at our ‘family feast'.

To the past . . .

Those early days were good, though not yet the riches I had envisaged when I first walked from my home a player. Too often hedges were our beds, and cloaks our coverings; and for four days once turnips and sprouts picked from the fields our only sustenance, not from lack of audience, but from a spring flood that set us between two streams and no roof to keep us warm. Nor did I shine, as I had thought — and they had all expected too — at acting.

‘Speak it most trippingly upon the tongue,' Richard urged.

‘But, hark,' I said, in what I thought were hero's tones, ‘what dawn doth break upon the east?'

‘Sounds more like the breaking of a clay pot,' said Matthew.

‘Or breaking wind,' said Rob and giggled.

I cuffed him, then held him at arm's length, laughing as he tried to punch at me.

‘Speak the line again,' ordered Richard.

‘But, hark, what dawn doth break upon the east?' I uttered hopefully.

‘Better,' said Matthew.

‘No, 'tis not,' said Richard flatly. ‘Will, we must admit it. As king, as ghost, as aged father, prince or Caesar, you will carry all before you. Your tone is too lordly for aught else, nor do you have the talent to change it.'

‘You wish me to leave your company?' I asked, forcing my voice to calmness. For even then I knew an actor must be able to be a king at breakfast, beggar at midday, and hero dancing for his supper.

‘What? By his Lordship's stockings, we do not! Look, you,' said Richard earnestly, ‘in you we have what other companies do not: a playwright who can craft words as cunningly as any goldsmith can a lady's ring. You can make the clouds weep —'

‘Clouds already weep,' said Rob.

‘Make crocodiles weep,' said Richard crossly.

‘But crocodiles do weep too.' Rob skipped out of the way of Richard's hand.

‘Silence, brat! I'll show you crocodile. Will, you must write your own parts that suit your manner and your voice.'

‘And write words for me,' said Rob firmly. ‘I am a thousand times better actor than you all — even you, Richard! Cannot a boy have a full speech? Nor yet a girl?'

Ah, brave new world, I thought, that has such people in it. I gazed at these friends who were so new yet so much of my bone and marrow.

Richard laughed, then plucked a walnut from his satchel and cracked it. ‘What playwright would give a girl a speech? What should a girl say, beyond gossip and “yes” or “nay”?'

‘And mostly nay to you,' said Matthew.

I thought of one girl who had said much, with words as finely wrought as any I could craft. I said nothing, but at that moment the plays I would write began to creep within my heart.

I was with my true kin now, and we tossed words into the air like jugglers' clubs, some kept, some dropped into the mud; we bandied words, we fenced with them, rapier bright and just as piercing. My mind opened like a child's who had been kept in a closet and then set free. Words danced like stars upon the pages kept in our big trunk. Not often good words then, I grant you. I wrote to please the yokels, and my groans and gasps of love were to please them too.

It was not until I reached London that I found an audience of subtlety and wit, that had been coaxed by the flame that was the Queen herself, more brilliant than any mind I have known. Although I say it only here, within this book that none will see, for now King James — not her son, nor even cousin — must be the best mind of the land, in plays as in all else.

And, in truth, His Majesty was a good patron. I worked well for him, and he worked well for me, though 'tis probably treason and
lèse-majesté
to say so. If Good Queen Bess disliked your words, she but banished you from her sight, and that were punishment enough, even without the loss of patronage and gold from a court performance. But a play must be writ now to fit our King's demands. Each copy of
The Tragedy of Gowrie
is burnt, lest it turn men's thoughts to plots His Majesty would have forgot . . .

Pah! I said I would write of happy times. And they were the gladdest times, those days before my eyes had seen
London, even when the beds had fleas and our audience was more lice than men.

But if Richard, Matthew and Rob were my true family, I was still my father's son, though unlike him I wrought coin instead of lost them. From the first day, I managed our affairs.

‘We play at the next guildhall,' I told them, as we sat next to a brook and ate the mutton pies packed by my wife and mother, and drank their two fine skins of ale.

‘Guildhalls need paying,' said Richard. ‘We can use the tavern for naught.'

‘Except a share of the takings,' added Matthew, his teeth well into a fine pie.

‘Taverns get more custom from our playing. Why should we pay the tavern-keeper as well?'

‘Ay, custom you call it, and custom it is. We dance, the audience pay, and when the money-box is broken, the tavern-keeper has his third.'

‘A third! Then it is the guildhall for us. And two plays in the one day, so that if we do not make the guildhall fee with the first, we do with the second, as word of our magic spreads.'

Richard grinned. ‘Think you so much of these new words you give us?'

‘Ay,' I said.

‘I like them.' Rob attacked his fourth honey tart. ‘Master Shakespeare's words give me shivers up my legs. And the audience stare as if a dragon's spell has turned them into stone. Master Shakespeare, can you write a dragon?'

‘Why, of course —'

‘Nay, he will not,' said Richard firmly. ‘Master Will must learn what can be staged and what cannot. How can players such as us clothe a dragon? Can ye dance, Will?'

‘A little.'

‘Ah, country dances. We must teach you London's best when we are there, though we pay the price of a good teacher. The groundlings come to see more than words.'

‘You can't see a word,' began Rob.

‘You can if they are played well,' said Richard. ‘You will learn, brat. The audience also come to see the dances that only gentry know, and rapier work new from Italy, and grand clothes, even if they are my Lord's and Lady's cast-offs and the landlady has spent all night mending the moth holes; even dancing bears if we can hire one cheap — whatever makes a spectacle.'

‘I see,' I said, and in truth I did. My wife would sooner see a dancing bear than hear my words. But one day, I thought, I will write words that need no dancing bears.

But they were long, full years before I did it.

Dinner: a small pig, roasted; a boar's head, stuffed (both sharest much in countenance with Thomas Quiney); saddle of mutton, roasted; pigeons, fried, with mushroom sauce; a plum pudding, boiled. Second course: partridges, roasted, with spinach; chickens, roasted, with sauce in the French manner; blancmange with apricots of the sun; whipped syllabub; and for subtleties, marzipan flowers in a host of colours; bread baked in the shape of a bride and groom — though I was glad to see the groom's head swelled in the baking and his toes burnt black.

Bowels: unmoving once again.