The Diary of William Shakespeare, Gentleman (3 page)

I waved and yelled, ‘Hurrah for Ned!'

But Ned looked straight ahead and not at me, as if already seeing what lay before him. Even when I ran to
the cart and held up the poem I had written for him, he took it but did not meet my eyes, nor did he look back as the cart rumbled down the road.

And all I could think was, if only they had chosen me.

Today's dinner's first course was roast kid with sauce; minced mutton shapes; a pie of sparrows; beef collops with marrow bone; a tart of apples and the sparrow brains; medlar jelly; quinces preserved in cider, which again I feel did not agree with me.

My waters clear, but bowels unsteady. I fear the upset will give me bad dreams, and I will dream of Ned.

Today the tooth surgeon did come and pull my wife's bad tooth. He says there are two more to pull, but my foolish wife will have none of it, as they are at the front.

‘'Twill make me a toothless crone,' she said.

I did a husband's duty, lifted her hand, kissed it. ‘Thou may be toothless, but a crone, never.'

Nor did I lie. Was it a lie when I cried out that my brother had murdered me when
I played the ghost of King Hamlet? Did I lie when as Prince Harry I led the army to
victory at Agincourt? ‘
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, or
close the walls up with our English dead!
' Though in truth, my Prologue was
better than my Prince Harry. My Prologue left the audience agape, and could cause a
man making for the privy to halt his steps. The audience cheered me for my Prince
Harry, but it is silence the actor most desires, when you have carried the watchers
to a land so far beyond their lice bites or their hunger that it takes them
heartbeats to return.

The squire's son has come to the smithy again. The smith will be wondering at this horse that loses so many shoes. But I knew Bess was not there, for my wife had told me that the girl was going on the carter's dray to lay
in a store of stockfish for the winter, and my wife had given her sixpence to buy our store too. Poor Bertram. No kisses, and an hour's discourse with the smith instead, though at least they could talk horses.

I had no conversation at dinner today but with Judith, who reproached me for not having found her a husband, as if husbands are to be discovered under gooseberry bushes.

My fortune came too late to wed Judith young, and, as she grows in years, her nose grows too. I would not say she is bad-featured, but with all a father's partiality I cannot say there is much in her to love, she being spoilt as her mother's youngest. Nor is her estate an easy one, for while she is a gentleman's daughter, I am newly so, which prevents her marrying high, unless she catches some lordling's eye. And marrying low would sully our reputation.

‘Take me to London and to court then, Father,' she pouted.

I sighed and cracked a walnut between my fingers, my hands still strong. How could I tell the girl that her country manners would cause her to be mocked at court? She has been taught dancing by a master, but who can teach her the quick wit of the court? Not I, for I have tried. Once I thought she might suit the younger daughter's lot, to care for her parents in their decline, but I would as put our wellbeing in the hands of No Eye Sue the beggar than Judith.

At last, tired of her complaining, I hied upstairs and to my pen. And with my pen came memories.

I did not forget Ned. Players came often to Stratford in those years, when creeping plague thrust its foul cloak over London's lords and beggars, and actors too, if they did not flee. Each time I hoped Ned might be one of the company. But though I asked, none had ever heard of Ned Forrest.

It was four years before I found out why Ned wept, and why he could not tell me what his tears were for. The company who came to us that year was Sir Edmund's Wrothson's Players (each company must have its sponsor or be vagabonds, bound for gaol, not the stage). This company played at the guildhall, where gentlefolk sat upon good seats and the motley stood behind.

Father knew by then that I had a liking for such things, and from his goodness took me afterwards to the room where the actors changed their clothes. He introduced me to the chief actor and company manager, who offered me a tankard of small ale while Father went to speak to another of the company. Father had paid the fine for usury and the scandal had not spread. Yet once again he seemed worried. I was glad to see him smiling and among important men, or men I thought important then.

I drank, though the ale was sourer than we had at home, and said, ‘I enjoyed your
Antony and Cleopatra
, sir.'

The player bowed. ‘I thank you, young master.' He winked. ‘I vow there are a few tonight who would be Antony to our Cleopatra.'

‘I do not understand, sir.' I glanced over at Cleopatra, still in his dress, his black curls brushed like a girl's. Two men chatted to him, one a grain merchant, the other a farmer of some estate. As I watched, the merchant chucked the boy under the chin, winked, then came up to the manager.

‘A shilling,' he said.

‘Five, and he is yours for the whole night,' the manager told him.

The merchant spat on his hand and they shook to seal the bargain. The merchant took the shillings from his purse, handed them to the manager, then made his way
back to Cleopatra, who still wore the actor's smile that had wooed young Antony. I watched as they went out together.

I knew that women sold their bodies to men. I had even found out what fornication meant. But I had not discovered this. I realised now that Ned had known. When the players bought him, they must have explained his other duties and how to do them well. His father must have known too, for why else would he get a price so high for one young son? Enough for turnip seed, enough for wheat seed the next season, enough to keep his family and his fields.

‘Sir, have you come across Lord D'Naughten's Players?' I asked the manager. ‘They were here four years ago.'

He frowned. ‘The name I know. They travelled to Denmark when London's taverns were last closed, I think, or was it the Low Countries? I have not heard of them since.'

‘And one Ned Forrest? He was my friend. He went with them.'

A world of understanding filled his face. ‘Four years ago? He would be young then. I'm sorry, lad, I know him not.' He paused, then added, ‘Our Cleopatra shares in all our takings. No one is forced to go where there is true dislike.'

But not for love, I thought. And never free.

Poor Ned . . . I must finish his tale here, or I will dream of him again. And I have dreams enough to haunt me.

It was more than twenty years before I had news of him. We had built the Globe by then. Beggars who had been actors once sat outside, their faces like their lives shrunk to rotten apples, for what is an actor once teeth and face are gone, if they have not saved coin for their old age? No man can act if he loses teeth and cannot play
a hero as well as an old crone, nor his mumbles be heard above the crack of walnut shells. For charity's sake we who still sunned ourselves in warm success did not hound them off our cobbles.

One night I saw a new beggar, old and with no teeth. Dimly I saw in the crumbled face that first Caesar of my childhood. I dropped threepence into his bowl.

As he muttered, ‘Bless you, sir,' I said, ‘I saw you play Caesar at Stratford when I was just a boy. A fine performance.'

He straightened a little, even in his rags. ‘Thank you, Master Shakespeare.'

All men in London knew me in those days. I warrant many know me yet.

‘You took a young lad as apprentice. Ned Forrest was his name.'

‘Ah, Ned,' he mumbled. His breath could have stopped a charging bull. ‘He wasn't with us long.'

‘He found another job?'

‘Ay, you could say that.' The beggared Caesar giggled, and I knew my threepence would go on gin. ‘A job at the bottom of the river. Being a corpse, that was Ned's job, eh.'

I asked quietly, ‘How did he die?'

‘Why, he drowned himself. The poor puppy started damp with tears, and died a wet one. Two months, maybe three he drowned, after we took him. Some takes to the life and some doesn't, and he was one of those.'

‘A sad, cold end,' I whispered.

The beggar squinted at me. ‘If you give me another penny, sir, I can see your play tomorrow. They say Apollo guides your tongue, that every line you write strikes like a spear.'

I did not want his flattery. I put another penny in his dish, and went to dine with Ben Jonson and laughed and drank. But the next day I lit a candle for young Ned, and have done every Sunday since.

And never, in any company I have been part of, has a boy been asked to whore.

Eight invitations to dine, but I preferred not to venture out into the mud.

Dinner this midday: a quarter of roast boar, delivered as a gift from the squire, who, if he has not a son with enough sense for conversation, does have the gift of hunting; a dish of mutton, stewed; eels with worts and gravy; an elderberry tart. Second course: a chicken pie; pigeons, roasted, our dovecot giving us good harvest all year now; a mess of parsnips and leeks, the first from our garden this season; pears baked in cider; May butter; a raspberry tart; a cheese; medlars, soft fruit my wife likes much; and good October beer, of which we now have enough barrels in our brewhouse to last well into summer.

Bowels: steady. Waters clear and strong.

My wife has just come in rain-wet and chilly-fingered from our dairy after checking that the cheeses be turned. The maids are pickling pears and making apple jelly and quince paste, and Judith is visiting her sister, I suspect to escape straining jelly and cutting the quince cores. The house smells sweet, but sticky. And I to this room, with a good fire and spiced ale to ward off autumn's breath, to live awhile in memory.

Ned's father sold his son at ten years old. I was eighteen before my father sold me, but that evening at the guildhall play was the last I spent as a schoolboy.

The four winters since Ned had left had been hard too. Another year of blight, then a winter so cold and long the snow did not melt till June. The wheat ripened on short stems, enough to fill our bellies, but not long enough to make straw for thatchers. Roofs leaked like kitchen sieves, and tempers grew short as beds grew damp, and such a crop of mould as if to mock the fields that harvested so little.

Plague's bony fingers shut the London theatres twice more. Corpses lay rotting, no one daring to bring them out. Dogs' bodies were piled in every street, as carriers of
the plague. Rats grew fat on dead men's flesh, free from teeth of Terriers. Once it visited our town too, though with quarantine crosses set upon the two houses that harboured it and their doors hammered closed, none died but the families shut up in them. The houses were later burnt to make sure no evil humours lasted. There are trees grown now where once there were black embers, but as I pass them I still wonder who died of starvation in those homes rather than of plague, for none would even take a basket of bread to plague-crossed doors.

Our household seemed prosperous. The ship from Venice did come back with silks and glassware, and a goodly price received. Father showed me the accounts, for a businessman's learning does not come only at school with its grammar and Greek and Latin. All was invested in another ship, off to the Indies this time, to bring back spices worth ten times what the Venetian ship had brought. For four more years, Father dreamt of buying a family crest, of setting up his carriage, of buying a new house with many chimneys and glass at its windows. And Mother dreamt, I suppose, of what most women do: happiness for her children, full bellies and bright eyes.

For four years between the boy of eight and youth of twelve, I dreamt I would go to university after I left the grammar school at fourteen. And after that? Perchance a university scholar if I won a fellowship, or a parson. I might find a place at court.

But dreams must end. When I was twelve I woke, as sudden as the rooster grabbed sleeping on his perch, to feel the axe upon his neck to make him dinner.

My execution fell when Father sat me by the fire in the hall while the women were in the kitchen-house, the children helping them. Father picked up a glove, made but
not embroidered, and sorted through embroidery threads. I thought he was going to show me a new decoration. Little did I know he would murder all my dreams, and let me embroider what new life I could.

‘I should be at school,' I said.

The master taught us older boys. He could be angry if we were late. But he knew me, knew my love of learning. He had even arranged for a scrivener to teach me how to form my letters easily. If I said my father had kept me, the master would believe me.

‘You are fond of school,' said Father heavily.

‘Yes, sir.'

I had shown the master some of my poems just the day before: one in Greek about a tempest and a shipwreck, which did not scan; and two in English, which he had praised. The master lent me his own books now, knowing he would get them back not just unmarked but their covers freshly rubbed with neat's-foot oil, and with an apple tart or cherry fritter from my mother as thanks for notice of her son.

‘The ship has sunk,' my father said.

For a moment I thought the master had spoken about my shipwreck poem to Father. Then I realised it was the spice ship that was gone, and all our hopes with it, sunk in sand-strewn darkness far beneath the sea.

‘I can make it right,' said Father quickly. ‘I can borrow money, invest again. But I must resign from the council till our fortunes are made good. Until that day . . . William, you must leave school.'

The school had no fees, but paper and quills cost money, as did the fee for the scrivener, nor, it seemed, could our house support a son who did not work.

‘What shall I do, sir?'

Perhaps Father had found a position for me in the squire's household, or even a merchant's, doing accounts and writing letters.

He did not meet my eye. ‘There is no money for an apprentice fee for any other trade. I am sorry. You must be my apprentice. I have no influence now to find you any more.'

My dreams vanished like mist sucked by the sun. Oxford, Paris, Wurtemberg, a life beyond a craftsman's tools — all were lost to me. Instead of barren acres, ours were barren ships. For the first time, I judged my father. I saw his ships as such that dreams are made of, no more likely to bring us fortune than an apple tart to fly. I had lived my father's dream for twelve years. Now I must be what I had always been meant to be: a glover's son, a glover's apprentice.

What does a man owe his father?
I love thee according to thy bond, no more nor less.
'Twas I who wrote those words.

Back then, I said, ‘If making gloves has made you the father I know, I will gladly make them too.'

Father embraced me then, with tears in his eyes.

I did not go to school that day, nor any other, except on Sunday afternoons to visit the master, and borrow books from him or return them, and to talk for a few hours of Greece and Rome and all the rest of Italy. The master held all the world in his bookshelves, I thought back then.

The rest of the week, I stitched gloves, until it became obvious that the hands that could not write neatly for all the scrivener's coaching could not stitch neatly either, nor even cut a pattern with a true hand. The only gloves I managed were worker's mittens, with no fingers for me to wrinkle like a dog's hind leg. I was put instead to
stretching and scraping leather with my younger brothers to make it soft, soaking it in the barrels of urine we kept out the back to make it hold the colour well, mixing the dyes, ensuring that black mourning gloves would not turn red with too much rain or sunlight, nor a lady's chalk-white gloves turn grey.

Year after year I tried to cut and stitch, but for all Father's coaxing I had no craft in me. I could not make a pair of gloves whose thumbs were the same size, much less design embroidery to captivate a lady; nor could I weave a glove of silk that did not look as if a cat had made its bed on it. Apprentice I might be, but never would I be a master craftsman. A glover does not make woollen mittens for his master's piece. My father might in kindness want to make me a full glover, but he had not the power to do so. A master craftsman must be judged by his peers.

Six more years passed and I was still an apprentice, wearing apprentice blue, smelling of wool and new cured leather. My world shrank like boiled wool, to the prison of a craftsman's hall, the company only of apprentices, with no more wit or knowledge than a fly. Yet still I wrote, at night when my younger brothers snored in our big bed. And even though I had seen my dreams shattered like a mirror cast upon the floor, more dreams came to me each time I held my quill — of a land beyond glove-making and Stratford markets, bound not by time or roads but stretching to the farthest reaches a mind can travel.

Father dreamt as well; dreams of our house and home, which would be no longer a craftsman's but a gentleman's. Sometimes he had me read to him from the schoolmaster's books as he stitched, and my younger brothers scraped the leather soft, and my mother and
sister worked on the embroidery. At times he sang, great lusty verses, and from them I learnt the tune that words can have, even bereft of music. My father gave me a love of life and words. He gave beyond his bond, so later I was bound to repay that bond to him.

As for the rest — his speculations in land, his borrowings, his mortgages, his sinful usury, his fondness for being a fine burgess of our town — was his ambition for himself, or for his family, that we should have more than the life to which we had been born?

I sit here the gentleman that he wished, even if my path to it was not what he had planned. He did his best, and no more can be said of any man.
The noble Brutus hath said that Caesar was ambitious; and if so, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath Caesar paid for it.

My father paid. And I, my father's son, I paid his penance too. I still pay now. All this I know. All this I do forgive.

This morning I did a message to my page to arrange the redigging of our sinks, for in this wet year they do not empty as they should, and to have our thatch checked against winter leaks.

Dinner: the squire and his son to dine with us, and Judith and Bertram carefully looking in any direction but at each other. It is obvious they do not suit, nor can I be sorry not to have the squire as my daughter's father-in-law and so often at my table, or I at his, despite his estate, for the man's dogs have more wit than he.

We ate roast kid, well fatted (I pay the fine for our house to eat meat on the week's fast days); green goose; late artichokes from our hothouses; skirret and celery salletting; cheese cakes; blancmange of chicory and
almonds; small gilded cakes; apple tart. Second course: saddle of mutton; beef steaks with quince sauce (of which I did not eat); pigeons, stuffed; eel pie; pear tarts with cheese; a gingerbread with caraway and preserved apricots from our own trees; marzipan fancies made by my wife in the shape of a deer and boar, in honour of the squire's love of the hunt, though boor would be as fitting; our own beer below the salt, with claret wine for the squire and myself.

Bowels: unmoving, like the squire's wit. Waters clear.