The Diary of William Shakespeare, Gentleman (15 page)

More wedding fuss: who shall wear what, and what linen should be taken to the Chapel Lane cottage, and which maids and men hired to wash and clean and air it and light great fires; and I to pay them at fourpence a day each, all to make my future son-in-law's haunches comfortable.

I left my wife and Judith conferring on what wedding subtleties might be wrought out of Lenten quince cheese — which does not agree with me, nor I with it, so I do not care if our whole store is used — and came up to this room with its good fire against the damp, my inkwell filled, my nibs sharpened. Indeed, my wife is an excellent ‘house wife', and if my heart strayed to those who had a mind and passions more like mine, it is to the house she keeps that I came back.

We players wandered all that summer, and into winter too, for the plague still left the London theatres shut. I worried that we might come unknowing to a village held in its grip, but players have an instinct that keeps them travelling safe, it seems; or perhaps those that do not soon play with skulls under the ground and not with the hearts of men.

We stopped at villages where travellers must and gave our performances in their inns, but in towns we performed only at the guildhalls, under cover from rain and snow and wind. Word of our coming flew before us, for I had discovered what other players, it seemed, had not. Why had my performance so raptured the audiences at Stratford? Not my method, surely, for I had but little then; nor yet my words, they mostly being simple folk who would not pay a penny or three to hear a wise word said. They shrieked and cheered because they saw a ghost. So that is what I added to the plays the company carried in their chest — not just my powerful words, but murder, ghosts, magic, betrayals, and murders enough to fill whole seas with jam mixed with red wine lees to make blood.

At last word came that the plague had loosed its grip on London. The taverns opened again, and once more their courts were free for plays. The crowds were eager for enchantment to light them from the dark of the plague year they had passed through, to show them gilded dreams instead of doors that still bore crosses, to carry them away from the heaped dirt of the plague pits, so vast that Fleet Street still stank with the memory of the bodies.

We brought enchantment; but I found it too. London. That one word does a thousand dreams bring.

I first saw it on a foggy eve, the mists rising from the river, the fog curling like a cat about the houses, and naught to see but night and yellow candlelight. We entered a tavern much like any I had seen: the patrons grumbling over pies and cheese and ale; and rooms above, with beds and fleas to share.

I drank, I ate, I slept, I scratched, I woke. But to what dawn? Cries filling the air: ‘Hot bread!', ‘Chestnuts!', ‘Codlins hot! Please buy my codlins hot!', ‘Eel pies!'

I ran to the window and looked out. A crowd such as I had never seen before: strutting apprentices, each with a rapier and knife; merchants in fur-trimmed cloaks; whores in bright silks, more bosoms in that one glance than I had yet seen in my entire life; chairmen carrying gentry with crests upon the chair doors. I noted that London women did not wear pattens to keep off the mud, for these streets were cobbled and already being swept clean by servants from each house along to clear the mess of rubbish and chamber-pot contents tossed out from the night before. And house upon house, rooftop tiled against rooftop, as if houses littered as liberally as rats, houses down to the river; and on that river, more traffic in that moment than had ever crossed the whole wanderings of the Avon, and a great barge with eight rowers and a damask chamber that I thought must be the Queen's — though it was not, not a tenth so fine, but being yet a yokel I knew not what finery really was. The noise, the stench, the laughter, the oaths, the bells pealing from church towers; each inch of the city had more life and soul than did the whole of Stratford.

And yet this book is not Will Shakespeare's guide to London town; nor yet to Elsinore, which a few years later we were to visit, to play in silent miming show to the court when the plague closed London's theatres once again. Nor is it a guide to queens and kings, not even in this book that no one else shall read, except to say I am both awed and grateful for all Their Majesties have done for me, and will always remain their humblest and most obedient servant that they deigned to notice such an unworthy scaffold of the art as William Shakespeare.

As for mine own life: we were met at that first dinner by Richard's father, James Burbage, the true director
of Lord Knudson's Men. Later, as my Lord Knudson rose up in full estate, so did we; as he became Lord Chamberlain, so were we the Lord Chamberlain's Men. It was a good dinner, although not in ale, which was sour — as it often is in London, where it be made in rotting casks and kept too long — nor in victuals, for we had bread and cheese and cold meat (which would be my lot for ten years more, for I sent most of what I earned to Stratford). It was rich in company, and richer still in plans, for James Burbage understood my business flowers, knew which to pluck and which to leave unplanted. With him I found my life's true meat, as with his son I found my ale and bread, in friendship, wit and plays.

Ah, those early plays. So much rampage and murder.
Titus Andronicus
— I
cannot count how many corpses were left by the end of that play, each to rise again
to play another part and be struck down once more.
Pericles
and
King Henry
VI
, both old but reburnished bright by me, a golden coating on a plate of
lead.

By the year's end we had prospered so that our company was able to pay for a roof above the Blackfriars Tavern, that we might play even when it rained or snowed, which it does as often even in London as in Stratford. That roof paid for itself by the month's end, and laid the corner stone of my fortune. Later still, we built our theatres, designed especially to show a play; though ale and sweetmeats still were sold, for who would come to a play if not to drink and dine as well?

We called the first The Globe, for such it was, all gentlefolk now knowing the world is round. All that world was encompassed in our theatre walls, where mighty armies, nations, kings all appeared. And ghosts,
murders and dancing bears, a golden crown, and rubies that, if real, would have bought a kingdom three times over, for the kingdom in the mind's eye is richer by far than any that the earth can bear.

Once a year at least I did go home; a mere hundred miles' journey, but so far it felt I wore a different skin each time I visited. For in my father's house I was no player, or wordsmith, but a father, husband and son of a father once again growing in prominence and estate. Within two years I had bought my father out of debt; and in a few more had bought him arms to display upon his chair when he was carried to the guildhall, where he was once more a respected member of the council. Never did he or I ever mention the plays that brought him that estate. If any neighbour spoke of them, my father frowned them down.

Yet it was my plays that bought this house for him and for my family, New Place, the second largest in the district and finer than any other, built of timber and brick both, which none here had done before; with dairy, ale house, granary, forcing houses, ten chimneys, five gables, two vast barns and an orchard with graftings of the best trees sourced from the Low Countries, where they be expert in such things, and such trees then brought to London for gentlemen to buy for their estates. And so in time I grew to be what Stratford now does see: Will Shakespeare, gentleman.

My wife and mother cooked a feast each time I did return. I let them know by letter at least a sennight before, that they might order sucking pig or boar's head or collar of beef, and make fresh ale, and bake the pies, and bid the neighbours come and dine. And I, who lived in humble lodgings in London so my family's estate
might grow, would put on my fur-lined cloak and red silk stockings, and trim my beard — for, as I played but kings and princes, I could let it grow, where Richard, Rob and Matthew must stay clean-shaven.

I brought gifts with every visit: a turtle for our dinner; oranges and spices; silks and brocades the like that were never seen in Stratford market; Venetian glasses far finer than my wife's sister-in-law's; and, from the Denmark visit, cloaks of fine white fur and leather softer than even the gloves my father had once made, but had no need to now. This I had given him, as he would have given me: he was John Shakespeare, gentleman.

For Hamnet, my son, I did bring an elephant — a score of them, carved to stand upon the floor all around his room; and for my daughters, pearl earrings and later necklaces, and for my wife and mother too.

And each visit I brought a poem home to Stratford. It was but a fancy the first time, to go to the beech tree a few days after I had arrived and to leave a poem and a red ribbon there. A few days after that, I saw the ribbon fluttering in the tree was blue and there was another poem, meant for me.

The first poem I left was one from my rewriting of the play
Titus Andronicus
(and tight he truly was, for he brought in such great crowds that space in our money-box became tight indeed). I had carefully chosen a verse that gave no mention of my heart, but showed my growing esteem as a poet:

Hear me, grave fathers! Noble tribunes, stay!

For pity of mine age, whose youth was spent

In dangerous wars, whilst you securely slept;

For all my blood in Rome's great quarrel shed;

For all the frosty nights that I have watch'd;

And for these bitter tears, which now you see

Filling the aged wrinkles in my cheeks;

Be pitiful to my condemned sons,

Whose souls are not corrupted as 'tis thought.

For two and twenty sons I never wept,

Because they died in honour's lofty bed.

For these, these, tribunes, in the dust I write

My heart's deep languor and my soul's sad tears:

Let my tears stanch the earth's dry appetite;

My sons' sweet blood will make it shame and blush.

O earth, I will befriend thee more with rain,

That shall distil from these two ancient urns,

Than youthful April shall with all his showers:

In summer's drought I'll drop upon thee still.

Not of my best, and indeed I blushed when I looked under the branches as I left for London once again. For this was what she left for me.

O, bard of Avon,

Let the men of London know

That mere women have senses like them: they see and smell

And have their palates both for sweet and sour

As men have. What is it that they do

When they change us for others? Is it sport?

I think it is. And doth affection breed it?

I think it doth. Is't frailty that thus errs?

It is so too. And have not we affections?

Desires for sport? And frailty, as men have?

Ah, women, women! Come, we have no friend

But resolution, and the briefest end.

I kept it as I kept all: first in my sleeve, and then inside the chest where all my manuscripts are kept, and kept all too within my heart.

During those visits I saw her on Sundays only, at church. Once again I carefully checked my stare and gazed only from the corners of my eyes.

I had thought she might grow stout, as women do who do not have babes to feed; or maybe become all bones, as one who has no husband in her bed. But Judith stayed herself: her eyes green, her hair brown, glimpsed under her veil.

Only once, perhaps, our glances might catch each other. That green-eyed look made every mistress I had known in London, Windsor, Elsinore, fade like dew when gazed at by the sun.

And then that sun was clouded, and I unable even to touch her hand to help it.

Dinner: pork, hashed; boar's-head pie; mutton collops, fried; a broth; plum pudding, fried and served with egg sauce and such, till I feared we'd eat the feast's leftovers till Lent. I will not eat of broken meats, especially those broken by lout Quiney, and told my wife so. Let the poor have ass Quiney's leavings. Sometimes my wife's early thrift makes her forget a gentlewoman's duty. She properly begged my pardon, and assured me of a butt of beef and new tarts tomorrow.

Bowels: moved, but small, and that reluctant.

Today it be Pancake Day. The bells rang at eleven, and every man dropped his spade. I heard the yells from Pancake Hill, where the race with skillets of boiling lard is held, the contestants hurtling downhill and tossing their pancakes. The one who reaches the bottom of the hill first and still unburnt, either his pancakes or his hands, receives the prize.

Our house is abustle for the nuptials of my foolish daughter, the date now set for 10th February. There is the brewing of small ale and turnip wine, jellies setting in the dairy — set with seaweed, my wife informs me, not a product of any animal's bone nor hoof, so we shall still keep Lent. Ah, Lent indeed.

Susanna is come to view her sister's dress and petticoats and stockings. I do not know if Judith has confided in her, but Susanna too must see Judith's wedding haste as strange.

Judith. At first I found it a joy to say the name; but soon the one became as two: my daughter and the other.

Year by year passed, and no speech between us. Our families' estates were too far apart back then for me even to hear her name in dinner gossip. But each time I
returned I found a ribbon and a poem on the tree; and each time I left I tucked a poem for her in the branches, and once even a fair copy of a play.

And so it was till the eighth year I visited Stratford, and sat at the feast with my family on my return.

‘How goes your school?' I asked my son. He was out of petticoats and into breeches now, and had begun Latin studies and Greek.

‘School is closed,' my Hamnet informed me, filling himself with sweet pig meat as fast as I had once seen young Rob do, now grown to be a master player.

‘Have the youth of Stratford learnt the world's wisdom already then?' I asked. ‘Or have you broke your master's heart by showing him such brilliance that he cannot share?'

Susanna laughed. My wife smiled, as always when she divined I spoke with wit, even if she could not understand it. My mother by then was deaf, and my father growing deafer too.

But Hamnet shook his head. ‘No, Father. One of the boys at school has caught the smallpox. I . . . I am scared a little, Father. He is my friend, and he might die.'

I did not lie to my son and say that his friend would be safe. Hamnet must know, even so young, how soon life can turn to death. One breath of smallpox slays a score of men.

Instead I turned to my wife. ‘Why did you not tell me this? How far has the contagion spread?' Had I avoided towns of plague and smallpox, only to find it here?

‘Peace, husband. The lad sickened on the way back from a visit to family far from here, and he had not been at school for more than two months. Only that one household has the illness, and it is quarantined. But the
schoolmaster sees it fit that the boys do not gather in case the infection may be spread from elsewhere.'

I nodded, still not assured. It would only take one foolish servant to leave the house, and half the town might sicken. ‘But what of the church, or markets?'

‘We make our prayers here; and have no need to go to market till we are sure that no more cases appear. Our larders are well filled; we have meat enough.'

‘And fish,' said Hamnet. ‘Father, do you know that humans have skeletons, just like fish? Dr Simon showed me in a book. I . . . I asked him if he knew aught to cure the smallpox.'

‘What did he say?' I knew pox doctors in London who claimed to have cures, but in truth no more of their patients lived than those who had no doctoring at all.

‘He said that blood letting might ease the fever, and a paste of pearls might help stop scars, but who lived or died was in God's hands.'

It was time to bring his mind to happier matters. ‘Would you like to hunt sparrows with me tomorrow? Or fish in the river?'

His look cleared. ‘Fishing, please, sir. I will show you which fish guts Dr Simon says a man has too.'

‘Horrid boy,' said Judith. ‘As if a man has fish guts!'

I smiled at Hamnet. ‘You wouldn't rather I helped you with your studies? Latin perhaps, and mathematics?'

‘But, Father . . .' My son managed a smile too. ‘You are jesting.'

‘Of course I jest. What be life without a jest?'

‘Pies,' said my Susanna, taking more chicken and pastry. She had been inspecting me all day, as if to learn this almost stranger who was her father, but seemed to have accepted I was still the father she had last seen seven months before.

‘Ah, but I have seen a pie made as a jest, when I dined with his Lordship two months ago. He cut the pastry and out clucked baby chickens.'

Susanna laughed.

My wife looked shocked. ‘Surely he did not eat the pie?'

‘No, it was a jest,' I repeated patiently. ‘His Lordship was a new-made father, and the chicks a reference to his young family.'

‘May I come fishing too, Father?' asked Judith.

‘I think you are best helping your mother, and learning the wise ways of the house.'

‘But I want to fish! I have never been fishing. If Hamnet and I were twinned at birth, then I should be allowed to fish too.'

‘And your brother should learn to sew? To make cheese and pickle damsons?'

‘The pickles would be indeed a pickle,' said Susanna. Even then the girl was quick of wit.

Judith pouted, the same pouts that she gives now. I wonder how Thomas Quiney will like it when she begins to pout at him.

My wife smiled to see us gay.

That afternoon I read to them from
The Lay of Henry V
, an old play I
intended to rewrite, to give heat and spirit to what was indeed a virtuous tale.
Suitable for my family, but not one that might make us rich.

And so to bed that night, and so to wake; and then to take the fishing rod, and go hand in hand with my young son to the river, with a groom to carry a basket with pies and cake and small ale for him and Flemish wine for me. The water flowed as if it had taken in the sun and winked it back again.

Our lines lay unplucked, except by eddies in the water. But fish were not our true game here, rather time for a father and his son.

I told Hamnet of the great ships that ploughed the ocean furrows; of new worlds settled by English colonists across the sea; of Venice, city of canals and palaces, and her ships that brought the wealth to build them.

His eyes gazed on far-off Venice, as mine had done at the same age. ‘Can you fish in the canals, Father?'

I laughed. ‘Assuredly. But if the canals of Venice be as thick with muck as London streets, you may not wish to eat the fish you catch.'

‘I would love to see it.'

‘We will both go,' I promised. ‘The year you finish university. We will see Venice, and Verona, and Bologna, even Wurtemberg together.' For I wished my son's mind to grow, just as his body did, that when he be full grown he might take his place in the world of men. My son would not be a burgess in a market town, and not a player for the motley either. My Lord Chamberlain would help him find a place at court, become secretary of the Queen's Navy . . .

I checked that dream as soon as it had swum across my mind. Her Majesty was what the world could not admit: old, and childless, nor had she named an heir. Soon we would have a King and all would change, and to what we did not know. But even to whisper that was treason. Time enough to pluck a fine future for my son in five years' time, or even ten.

‘And your life, Hamnet?' I asked. ‘Are you still liking school?'

‘I hoped you would not ask that, Father,' he said solemnly.

‘Why not?'

‘For people always do. But you are different.'

‘How?'

He turned to me, my clear-eyed son. ‘You see things, Father. And put them in your plays.'

‘You have been reading them?'

In truth, there were matters in them I would not have my family read.

‘Some, sir. The schoolmaster has copies. And your sonnets, sir.'

‘My son,' I tried to find the words, ‘those poems were written as I might write a play. They are much misunderstood. Yes, I have known love,' I did not say it had not been for his mother, ‘but those sonnets were ones written mostly for my Lord Southampton. In that year when the theatres were all closed, I wrote a book of poems that read like a play about a mistress who spurned me, and a friend who did the same. They have no more truth than any of my plays, which means a few grains of rye to a whole loaf of wheat.'

Hamnet nodded earnestly. ‘Master Wroughton, our master, says you're the greatest playwright in the land.'

‘Methinks he means the most wealthy playwright in this county, and so would please me, through my son,' I said wryly. ‘And truly, though all ask it, do you like the school?'

He shrugged. ‘Some things I do, and some I don't. I like it best after lessons,
for then we play.' He cast a look at me. ‘I like
things
, sir. Dr Simon cut
open a cat to see its bones and joints.'

‘Did he now?'

‘It was dead, of course, ere he touched it,' Hamnet added quickly. ‘It was most interesting. It had eaten of
a mouse, and there were feathers too in its stomach, but they were too digested,' he gave me the word proudly, ‘to say what bird it may have been. Father, might I study to be a doctor at university, do you think?'

‘Would you rather not study the Classics, then take a place at court?'

‘I like Stratford, sir.'

I laughed. ‘You have seen no other town. Wait till you see London and Venice before you decide to spend your life watching the Avon's swans.'

‘But I might find a way to make people live who have the smallpox, or the plague.'

‘None but God can do that, my son. But if you wish to stay here, after you have seen the world, you can be a gentleman, and live upon the rents of your tenants.'

‘What do gentlemen do?'

‘Watch for their tenants' welfare, and that of their household. Go to church as Christians. And, after that, whatever they might wish.'

‘Could a gentleman dissect a cat, sir?'

I laughed again. ‘No doubt. But for now you will go to school, as soon as it is safe to go again.' I pulled my line in idly, to check the fly was still attached. ‘You have your special friends?'

He nodded. ‘James Whittinger, and Michael my cousin, and George Marchmant.' His face grew clouds again. ‘It is George who has the smallpox.'

My heart and hand froze, as if my body had given home to all the oceans' winds. ‘Arnold Marchmant's son? Who has Mistress Judyth Marchmant as his aunt?'

Hamnet took it as no more than the usual enquiry of a household. ‘Yes, that is the one. Father, must he die?'

‘That is in God's hands, as Dr Simon said,' I answered, while my mind whirled. ‘Are any others in the household ill?'

‘George's aunt, sir. It was from her perhaps he caught the pox, the schoolmaster says, because each day she went to help the parson deal with the parish poor and ill. But others say he caught it first, when he visited another aunt. But I do not think anyone really knows who caught it first, Father. Their house is in quarantine, so no one can speak to them. I . . . I would like to, to tell George that I am praying for him.'

Smallpox or plague, the house door would be barred and no man to enter, lest contagion seize him too. Not for forty days after the last to sicken would the door be opened.

‘We will all pray for George, and for his family. And God comfort them, that they may know it. Come. We must go home.'

‘But, Father, we haven't caught a fish.'

‘The sun is too hot.'

Most stupid words, but all my cleverness had fled as if it sat in quarantine with her. I had not looked for a poem at the beech tree yet, nor hung one there. I left my son with his mother, made some excuse, and ran along the pathway to the tree.

There was the ribbon and the poem. But when I reached for it the bladder it was wrapped in looked so brittle it must have sat there for weeks. Did it carry the contagion? Nay, surely it must have been left before she was struck ill, and besides, any miasma it might have held must have been blown away by now. It must be safe.

I lifted it, the parchment cold against my fingers. I unrolled it slowly, lest it should tear or break. The ink had run, yet I could read it still.

No longer mourn for me when I am dead

Than you shall hear the church's bell

Give warning to the world that I am fled.

If you read this line, remember not

The hand that wrote it, for I love you so,

That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot

If thinking on me should make you woe.

She would not have left it if she herself had been sick — she knew the risks as well as I, or better, if she nursed those in the parish who had been taken ill. Smallpox infects all who are near it. Even plague does not carry such ill breath. Judyth would know how little chance there was to come out of that door again once it had been barred. She must have called her order to a servant, to take this message from a box she had not touched since her infection.

But her last act before entering that house again to nurse her nephew had been to comfort me, and say goodbye.

No longer mourn for me
. . . A life without her? But that was what my life had been, brief crumbs left in a tree from what might have been life's harvest. I mourned for what I never had, as well as for a world dimmer without her brightness.

I walked back home. Four words, for the smallest journey. What else to do? No wealth, no comfort, nothing I nor any man could offer, could help her now.

I thought, if we had married, she would not have been here. We would have been in London, for surely it was fated that I should become a playwright. If I had not met Richard, it would have been some other company that I joined, and earlier perhaps, needing employment, if I had not married Anne. I would still have made the threepences and sixpences, which, added up, had saved my father, paid
his debts and then made him a gentleman. I'd had two things to offer Judyth: my hand and my heart. Giving her but one had trapped her here, to sicken, perchance to die.