The Secret Life of William Shakespeare (26 page)

He ate a week’s worth of bread and meat in a tavern, filled a wineskin, and set out to walk to London. He arrived two nights later, staggering, with blood in his boots: chastened, though still able to smile at himself for turning so soon into the braggadocio soldier. On campaign there had been a lot more squatting than marching.

‘You’re back,’ his stepfather said.

It was late when Ben walked into the old house in Hartshorn Lane. A couple of candles were burning. The man was sitting with a pewter plate on his knee, looking into the fire. He might not have moved since Ben had sailed away. One difference only: a dog lay at his feet. It snarled at Ben, then stopped – perhaps sensing a man who had been among death. When you had seen the way brains leaked from a man’s ears while he still looked at the sky, you were not much impressed by a grumbling cur’s teeth.

His mother appeared. She gasped, but recovered herself quickly: only he could see the tears in her eyes as she embraced him. This, perhaps, was something like coming home from the wars. He didn’t expect it to last. He held her.

‘I missed you,’ she said; and, dutifully: ‘We missed you,’

‘So I can see. So much you got a dog to replace me.’

His mother shook her head, stroking his shoulder. Never a light-hearted woman, she had grown stern as a carved saint. His stepfather shifted. ‘The dog’s a watchdog. We’ve need of such. Only the one man about the house.’

‘A jest, a jest.’ And plainly no place for them here. He would have to remember. Black scourging laughter had kept them alive among the midges and mud, the desultory bleeding and dying of the unloved wars across the sea. ‘Can I stay here?’ Thinking: I can’t stay here.

‘Such a question. You’re my son. This is your home.’

Two different propositions, he thought. Living under canvas and hand to mouth, words had become even more like living things to him. At Bergen-op-Zoom he had recited a whole book of Virgil to take his mind off the sound of the ordnance. It was reassuring to find his memory intact. It was about then, however, that he had begun to wonder if he was a coward. Remembering Master Camden and his scholarly method, he had decided to put the question to proof.

‘So I issued the challenge. A single combat, in full view of both camps, against the enemy champion.’ Ben told his stepfather about it some days later, in the man’s favourite tavern. Same polished tankard, but the chair had moved closer to the fire. Grandeur.

‘With swords?’

No, warming-pans. They had gone without hating each other thus far. Just a few growls, like the dog. It couldn’t last. ‘Aye, swords. Like a duel. The victor to take the spoils from the vanquished, the armour and weapons, a true Homeric contest.’ Not that he had had any armour.

His stepfather took a pull on his ale. He looked puzzled. ‘Why?’

‘Because…’ He wished he were with someone who didn’t have to ask. He wished half of mankind were not fools, and he wished it were not his destiny always to be in company with that half. ‘Because it was all a confusion there, a struggle without faces, explosions in the dark. But I was real and he was real, and so it was real…’ Strange, he couldn’t remember the Spaniard’s face now, though he had put his visor back, and at one point as they hacked at each other he came near enough to smell his breath. He remembered the cheering, the half-frozen ground at his feet crunching like biscuit, the ribbons on the Spaniard’s breeches, but not his face. And he could remember not being afraid, which was the point.

‘Did you win?’

‘Well, I’m here, am I not?’ He bought his stepfather another drink, in a spirit of no hard feelings, and changed the subject. But his stepfather’s brain was still on it, like a dim winter sun creeping above the horizon.

‘You killed him, then?’

‘Such is war.’

He had, hadn’t he? That was the vaguest part. The Spaniard had gone down, bleeding at the throat, and his seconds had come hurrying to stanch, to carry him back to their camp, and Ben had turned to receive the cheers of his comrades, and nearly collapsed himself with exhaustion and faintness, the blood pouring from his arm. After that there was the bandaging, the settling of bets – at least half of his troop had wagered against him, he discovered – then a drenching rainstorm, which made both camps up-sticks and move to higher ground. Somewhere there he remembered being sick and sick again. Somewhere also he remembered the feel of bone crunching under his sword-point staying in his arm, like a chronic thrill: something far beyond the little sneeze-like thrill of lust. He frowned. It was a story that wasn’t clean enough in his memory, somehow. It would have to be trimmed.

‘Well, that’s all over now,’ his stepfather said at last. He set down his empty tankard with a little refreshed noise. As he grew older, or perhaps Ben was just noticing it more, he was full of these drearily appropriate little tributes. To the fire he spread out his hands and said, ‘Ah. A chill breeze, brrr, cold.’ They seemed to satisfy him, where before life had made him surly. Ben wasn’t sure which he preferred. On second thoughts, he was.

‘You gained no money by it, I suppose? Soldiering?’

‘None. But saw a little of foreign lands, men and manners, the great wide world…’ He gave up. ‘No, no money.’

‘Hm. Well, you know you broke your apprenticeship. But since you were pressed … I’ll talk to the master of the Guild about it. I stand pretty well with him now, you know.’ His modestly proud expression sharpened, slitted. ‘And you’ll not wish to be a burden on your mother.’

No: he didn’t. So the next week he resumed bricklaying with his stepfather. It was sickening, terrifying, how quickly he picked up the old skills. His hated tools seemed to have been waiting for him.

He still intended to be the most learned man in England. He thought about it, and about the way life turned, its surprises, its inevitabilities. He thought about poor deaf Nicol. And he gave himself five years. He would see where he was then. If he was still laying bricks, then he would think about doing something Roman and final, as Nicol had said he would.

Not in any morbid spirit. In the spirit of a man who had looked at life and used his mind. A spirit not given to everyone. Most of mankind was like his stepfather. Hens from the coop, pecking up the same little pleasures day after day, knowing no better. He saw them at the theatres. He didn’t mean to go at first. He thought, after that bloody pageant of folly, the play would be a trifling thing. But when he went to test the hypothesis, everything changed. Within minutes of entering the round of constructed wonders, he knew better.

Because here, and not out there, was shape. Here you could impose a sort of order. And it wasn’t a lie, because the order was there behind the shambling mêlée of life, and the mind, the tutored mind, could find it, apprehend it, steep it in language, teach and learn. Given the right play, of course, and he was still an exacting critic of plays, after the first starved indiscriminate rapture was over. Each play was all very well, but each had to take its chance alongside the perfect play that he saw fitfully thrown, a teasing shadow, on the wall of his mind. Someone would have to write it, one day – else what an opportunity would be lost. Look at them cramming in, stretching their necks, straining to hear, if not to listen. Only a bear-baiting or a hanging drew a bigger crowd.

Three playhouses open – Theatre, Curtain, Rose – but no shortage of audiences. Nor, alas, of stupidity. He didn’t just mean the aping, gaping groundlings: my lord in the balcony was often as dull to the quality of the fare. Which was to Ben still exasperatingly mixed: he adored and detested together. He had seen too much of sloppy imperfection abroad to tolerate it here on the stage, where man was in control, where an example could be made of balance, taste, order. Still the dullards of high and low clapped in the wrong places and would not use their minds. Even in Marlowe; and while Marlowe had been emperor when Ben left, he came back to find him only a king. The rich territory of the drama was being disputed. A good thing, Ben thought. But in time some arbiter of taste would be needed, to sort out these jostling pretenders. To lay down the rules, if you liked.

‘Ah, but who is to do it? A man would have to wield a great deal of authority,’ said Master Camden. Ben had taken courage, washed off the brick-dust, and called on him at Westminster School. He expected the sight of the hall, the smell of slate and stove and hot fresh learning, to hurt him with the knife of what might have been. No sharper knife … But he felt little. A pinprick. He was rapidly putting on flesh – in more than one way, it seemed. Well, a thick hide was good too.

‘Authority, exactly so. Which is what learning gives you. That’s why a pupil hearkens to a master. Besides, good sir, I remember you yourself saying our English was still too raw for a refined literature.’

‘Did I say that? A little arrogant in me. I don’t know, Benjamin: can we fence Parnassus? These plays grow as they list, I think: they thrive in the sunshine of general approbation. Would they thrive under glass? Again I don’t know.’ A smile. ‘I grow less certain of things as I get older.’

Ben found quite the opposite – but he held his tongue. He venerated Master Camden still, even if he felt, a little treacherously, that he had lived too easy up here with his books, monastic. Also Master Camden was inherently modest and humble. Again Ben venerated it – but he felt it would not do for him, any more than a lowering diet and chastity. You had to live by what suited.

And the theatre – yes, give him a throne of judgement, and he would speak on it
ex cathedra,
tell the world what was wrong with it and how it could be better. Marlowe was magnificent. Marlowe had faults. And so did this new king, or pretender perhaps, William Shakespeare.

‘Who is he? A player. Just a player.’ Nicol was gone but there were still a few familiar faces among the young sufferers of play-sickness who gathered in theatre-side alehouse and skittle-yard. ‘With Lord Strange’s Men now, I fancy.
Harry Six
is his, yes, and the
Shrew,
and
Crookback.
Those I know for certain. Others he may have had a hand in.’

‘A player? Not a man of learning? How long a player?’

But his acquaintance – a thick-necked scrivener’s apprentice with a half-broken donkey voice – had little more to tell him. Ben suspected he had never liked him since he had corrected his grammar once, in front of his peers. Well, a scrivener should know better. Resentment, alas, was the reformer’s lot. He was only trying to improve him.

As for finding out more about Master Shakespeare, Ben found that no easy task. Things heard, from asking around: Shakespeare, yes, a player. You might have seen him in something. In his
Harry Six,
I think. No, I think not. Plays drolls. No, tragical parts. He’s from the country, I hear. A butcher’s son. No, a lawyer’s clerk. No, usher in a school. Very young. Younger than Marlowe. No, thirty and more … Ben even came across one alehouse gibberer who twitched and winked, and for the price of a pint confided at last the mystical truth he knew: that Shakespeare was not really a play-maker at all, and the plays he put his name to were brought to the theatre by night in a silk-tied bundle, with a peer’s coronet on the seal. Then he fell over sideways.

Oh, he was real enough, of course, but certainly elusive. Even after Ben saw him and admired him in a play, remembered indeed admiring him in other things, a natural presence, understated, still afterwards he found he couldn’t quite bring back his face in his mind. Something indeterminate in its good looks. And when he waited about with the other play-sick outside the Curtain to watch the players leave, he still found that Shakespeare had walked past him before he realised who he was – and even then he had to look again at the slender, taut-shouldered figure making its solitary quick way down the street to be sure: yes, that was him. It was as if he were one of those little bubbles on the surface of the eye that you had to concentrate to make yourself aware of. Always there: part of you.

Ben nearly ran after him, that first time. Not sure what for, unless to say: ‘Master Shakespeare, you have it. In you I hear the true note of poetry. And unlike Marlowe it is the poetry that might fall from the lips of mortals, all too mortal, and not heroes half made of brass. You have it, and if only’ – well, probably it wouldn’t have been apt just there, in the street, to add that he needed to trim the luxuriance of his language a little, put a muzzle on his roaming imagination lest it turn wild. No, chiefly he wanted to shake his hand and declare himself an admirer. Found in him an inspiration, even. Especially as one of the unassailable facts about this new play-maker and pleaser – yes, he held them, gaper and listener alike – was that he hadn’t come from the university. Ben even silently raised a glass on the strength of that, later, alone, when certain memories of hope and loss visited him and crawled over his drink-mood like spiders in a dungeon. And perhaps there was a little of this: what he can do, can I not do? But shut that out, no room for it when he had to be up early to build a wall in Lad Lane.

I shall meet him, though, he promised himself. It was one of those things that life simply contained: it was going to come, put together Fate and will. Unlike his next move, which need not have been; it was simply the result of a set of decisions. He chose to get married.

8

The Bloody Brother (1591–2)

Damn Marlowe.

He disappears from his life again, but keeps occurring in Will’s thoughts where, yes, he cannot make up his mind. He is alarming: attractive, probably not as much as he thinks he is, but that never stops a whirlwind like him. He is lofty, absolute, with the extreme disdain of the lately arrived. (Will at night, before dreaming, walks into that Canterbury shoemaker’s house and knows where the clothes-chest is and the stair-turning and can see young Kit there, fair head over a book, can almost reach out and touch him.) Like Tamburlaine in his chariot, he whips past you, dull plodder in his dust. Yet you feel that it’s himself he’s whipping.

Will mistrusts him and wants to be like him: that power to thrill and persuade. But he ought not to think of it. He ought to get on with learning his lines and earning his bread. You know besides that Marlowe thinks you a fool, thinks it is a world of fools, and somehow that does not take you very far: it’s a little closed alley with no river rippling beyond it. Still Marlowe comes to mind – or, rather, occurs to him like a sensation, like eating with a knife and doing what always made his mother shake her head at him, licking it along the blade to get the sauce, and you could taste the edge like dangerous knowledge.